A while back we registered the domain name supstream.com. The $8 intent was to create a smart identity aggregator that would allow you to centralize your streams. Kind of like Jaiku, but not in a half-ass, all-my-bits run in a river kind of way.

The idea came towards the front of a demand explosion at work, so it ended up on the shelf. Since then, a handful of similar ideas have actually made it to the internets, and some are even making a run towards mainstream.

Identity aggregators are going to be more and more popular. Content shards are being shot out in all directions via Twitter, flickr, pownce, del.icio.us, ma.gnolia, facebook etc. and it’s impossible to keep track of any one person without tying some of the parts together.

But despite some pretty impressive execution (socialthing is awesome), all these tools fail at the same thing. They blend everything up – different content types from all your friends across all networks – and force it all at you through a single stream. It doesn’t work. But, it could…

People filters.

The aggregators I’m paying the most attention to (spokeo, friendfeed, and socialthing) all have a huge opportunity to do something that most of the originator networks don’t even do themselves: identify contact types. Imagine being able to flip between family, work, friends, etc. A simple tagging / filtering mechanism would launch these services into something extremely useful.

Content [source] filters.

The idea that an aggregator would even launch without the ability to screen content by source or type amazes me. It’s bad enough that everything just gets blended up into a simple mess, but to not provide the tools to untwist it all is just plain mean.

Identity handling

I’ve been trying to keep this familiar by labeling these tools as identity aggregators. They aren’t. They aggregate the content streams of friends, regardless of how those friends identify with each stream. I could very quickly define, rank, categorize and tag my streams to give you clues on how I roll. But, instead you just see stuff with my name on it. Flat like that.

The current tools don’t seem to be paying any attention to this last part. They focus on aggregating content authored within a loose network. Identity is something else entirely. It’s actually the part we were excited about 10 months ago when we registered the domain name. Think how much content definition is lost by not allowing the author control to specify family, work, primary, casual, nsfw, etc.

I hear over and over that web 2.0 is no longer solving real problems. That doesn’t mean they don’t exist. Or that the space is closing down. Personally, I think it’s still wide open. Geocities got more right than most of the current players. (southbeach, ftw)