Entries in social media clients (1)

Tuesday
Mar092010

Return of the portal?

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!