The Real McCrea

Every few months, I like to check in to see how the ‘pure-play webide aggregators” are doing. [Disclosure/reminder: I head up marketing at Plaxo.]

This is getting ever more complicated, as webwide lifestream aggregation is becoming the blueprint for the Social Web, as instantiated in the UX for Facebook, MySpace, Yahoo, Microsoft, and AOL, in addition to the smaller players who blazed the trail (Plaxo, launched mid-2007, and FriendFeed, a few months later).

Here’s the latest from Compete.com (which, like all other traffic-trackers, has its issues, but is generally directionally-correct).:

Michael Arrington of TechCrunch shines a spotlight on the FriendFeed side of the growth issue in a post this evening, leveraging Comscore data. Michael, in his poetic way, describes FriendFeed as being in danger of being “the coolest app no one uses.”

I don’t know which services will end up being the big winners in this emerging Social Web space, but I do know for sure that we will witness an explosion of innovation that will mirror what we saw in 1994, 1995, and 1996, with lots of losers and a few big winners. Personally, I am very excited to see what happens!

The seduction was slow, and I played hard to get. And quite frankly, at times I thought for sure that I didn’t want to fall in love…with Facebook. But, I must admit, I’m now head over heels.

It started with occasional visits, guilty little glimpses into that once-college-only world. A few connections to some friends. Over the months, I wasn’t even really aware that I was slowly building up my “social graph” there, but recently I noticed the velocity was picking up, as fraternity brothers, high school friends, coworkers, and even my next door neighbor connected with me there.

Also, along the way, I came to know the Facebook team, folks like Dave Morin, Luke Shepard, Josh Elman, and Julie Zhuo (and many more) through events like the OpenID Design Summit. Heck, I even got to build a relationship with Mark Zuckerberg, in part by accidentally stumbling on to his Twitter account, which led to a bunch on exchanges with him. (Including this awesome tweet, in which he let me know he’s a fan of our weekly video podcast The Social Web TV.)

And Facebook, which could have used it’s market leadership position to attempt to build “Walled Garden 2.0,” instead has been moving boldly down an ever more open pathway. My friend David Recordon said it well recently in a post entitled Facebook in 2010: no longer a walled garden.

But, at the end of the day, it is the great product the team has built that kept pulling me back (via the way it has engaged my real-world friends from various facets of my life). Tonight, I was delighted to see the new design. It addresses all of the things I was most hoping would be improved. I know I will be giving more of my attention to this app (at the expense of more traditional media).

Okay, I’ve gone over the top with this post, but I’m glad I got this off my chest. Why is all of this significant? The Web is going social (with a big help from Facebook), and the Social Web is going open (along with Facebook). That means we’re on the cusp of a massive wave of change that will unleash an innovation explosion.

Oh, and the “pie” is about to get much bigger for companies like Plaxo (my employer) and many, many others. The zero-sum game is not what we’re playing.

In my most optimistic moments, I think about how all this social media stuff (like Twitter, Facebook, blogs, and aggregators like Plaxo and FriendFeed, and more), which so many dismiss as a waste of time, is really paving the way to making us all smarter. Here’s an example of that.

When I was an undergraduate at M.I.T., my social network there connected me with an alum, Bob Kerns. I really liked Bob, and we had some great interactions, but our paths diverged, and I lost track of him. Then, a few weeks ago, we reconnected via social media, in this case on Facebook. As a result, we’ve been exchanging thoughts, and recently he posted so many pithy comments, that I encouraged him to transform them into a blogpost.

He did, framing it as a response to my last post, and I found it fascinating. One thing I particularly enjoyed was that he makes reference to having been “on the Internet since 1972”! I think my readers will enjoy his post in its entirety, so I will link to it here. Please consider: Minority Report: The Facebook Copyright Controversy: I See 404 Pages.

This provides some interesting perspective on what it means to post stuff online.

The Social Web will be the biggest transformer/disrupter since the birth of the Web itself. What if you applied “social” to the relatively staid world of online posting of jobs? Plaxo gave its answer to that question today, with the launch of “social job listings” in partnership with Simply Hired. [Reminder/disclosure: I work at Plaxo.]

Wired’s Michael Calore did a great writeup on the news: Plaxo Debuts New Job Search Service for ‘Viral Hiring’

IMHO, the official Plaxo post I wrote on the announcement deserved more attention (but I’m biased), so I’m including some of it here (and linking to it, of course):

This is a great time at Plaxo. In 2008, we had triple-digit growth in all of our key metrics, including new users, monthly unique visitors, and pageviews. We increased our network density, with the number of connections in our next-generation social network skyrocketing from 2 million to over 30 million. We got acquired by a stable, profitable, and growing company, while remaining an independent business unit, resourced for growth. (We’re hiring.) And, we’re making great progress at becoming a vital social utility for one of the most valuable demographics: post-college professionals.

But, of course, we are well aware that most companies out there are in a different position, and that our members are confronting a deepening recession, rising unemployment, and decreasing job security. It is that sobering reality that inspired us to come up with a better way to connect job seekers with career opportunities, working together with Simply Hired, the largest job search engine, to introduce “social job listings” on Plaxo.

For users in the U.S., we’ve rolled out a new Jobs section on Plaxo, where hiring managers and recruiters can post new job listings, and where job seekers can browse or search postings from across the Simply Hired network. But jobs posted on Plaxo aren’t like job listings anywhere else; job listings on Plaxo are turbo-charged with the “social power” of your extended network.

What do you think? I, for one, am curious to see if this new form of job listing can bring greater efficiency to the now-more-than-ever important process of connecting job seekers with career opportunities. If you’re a Plaxo member and see a job listing shared with you, please consider “paying it forward” and re-sharing it to your network. Thanks!