Return of the portal?
Tuesday, March 9, 2010 at 10:24PM Anyone remember the web portal craze around the turn of the millenium?
I am not the first to draw a comparison between this and the way in which some of the current crop of Twitter clients (Hootsuite and TweetDeck being the two I have used most) are expanding their reach to become more like "social media portals".
However, take a look at today's post on the Hootsuite blog announcing that "Just in time for SXSW" Hootsuite will be adding Foursquare and MySpace to the list of social networks it supports.
I'm not sure yet whether the Foursquare integration will be added to the Hootsuite iPhone App (so that users can check-in via Hootsuite on the go) or whether this is limited to seeing your friends' Foursquare activity via Hootsuite on the web. Either way, it is quite an interesting development.
Are we going to see a second round of the "portals war" as social media clients vye to aggregate your friends' activities across all the different social networks?
ps. on an unrelated note... if you are going to SXSW then my jealousy knows no bounds. Austin is a great city and with the addition of music and tech... Any tips for how I can persuade my firm that it would be a worthy use of my expense account would be most welcome!
Reader Comments (1)
FriendFeed had a go at doing this a couple of years back, but never really took off beyond its core audience of the digerati. Of course, a lot of the success of this kind of startup is due to timing, so the social media portal's day may yet come.
You seem to be (mostly?) talking about social media client apps though. Some of these are doing well at the moment, but will have a tougher time as CRM vendors and personal email clients add more social capabilities. Of those you metion, Hootsuite in particular is nicely placed to make it an attractive acquisition for a CRM company in the near future.