Content aggregation. Past present Future

Traditional print media is going through hard times. This is obvious to everyone who gets all the important information on the Web and does not remember when he last bought a paper newspaper or magazine. At the same time, more and more interesting and high-quality content is created not by professional authors, but by ordinary people through blogs and social networks.

According to the Harvard Business Review, humankind has generated more data in the past two years than in its entire previous history. In this regard, the problem of information overload comes first. 21% of the time spent on the Internet, users spend on search, and 41% of this time falls on the search for once-seen content. The numbers clearly indicate problems, both in obtaining new information and storing existing ones.

Interestingly, the impact of social networks. According to ComScore, 47.8% or 181.5 million Europeans visit news sites (9% more than last year) and in 10% of cases, viewing news is preceded by a visit to Facebook. The study also says that this percentage is gradually increasing, which indicates the increasing role of social networks in the process of searching and using information.
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Why do we need content aggregation?

Obviously, it is becoming more and more difficult for the user to navigate in the huge flow of information that is available to him now. In addition, some abstract information is no longer needed by anyone - everyone wants to read exactly what they like or like. And besides, spend all this time minimum.

For this, various solutions are created for aggregation or content curation (aggregation or curation). Their main tasks can be defined as:

• saving time;
• saving money - many media are now trying to limit access to their content by a paid subscription - it's unprofitable for everyone to pay, it's easier to use an aggregator that has already solved all the issues with the copyright holders;
• increasing the relevance of search results;
• content archiving and categorization;
• single entry point;

A bit of history

During the existence of the Internet, a large number of attempts have been made to help the user somehow streamline and catalog what he personally finds on the Web. It all started, perhaps, with the bookmarks in the first browsers in 1993 and the search engines that were originally the very directories of someone selected in advance links.

Then progress has reached the most popular social bookmarking services. Bookmarking services were and are among the flagships of the idea of ​​Web 2.0 and UGC (user generated content). It is not surprising that after the emergence of the most popular and still alive service Delicious, similar services began to appear like mushrooms after rain.

Another very prominent company in this field is Digg, founded in 2004. Digg works as a recommendation system for sharing and ranking news. after him, Reddit appeared in 2005 and Newsvine in 2006.

Modern market players

If we talk about more or less modern solutions, the example here is Pinterest.com , which was originally positioned as the image curation service. The project entered the international scene in 2012 and became the third most visited website in the United States after Facebook and Twitter. According to research firm research company Experian Hitwise , Pinterest has more visitors than LinkedIn, Tumblr and Google+. This suggests that, despite all his cats, it is a convenient and popular tool for filtering photo content.

Another new look at the preservation of the desired content can be called Clipboard . It allows you to save both the entire page and its part: text, photos, or an element of a web site. All saved is in the user profile. In addition, each such saved fragment has a link - from where it was taken and tags that are assigned manually. Habitual social elements are also present: you can share saved, make friends and look for new friends.

In addition to the projects presented above, Likehack.com can also be noted - an automatic search and content storage service based on user activity in social networks. Just recently, the company received investments and is now engaged in the development of the project. Despite the fact that the service is in the alpha-version, according to his manual, he already handles accounts of more than 500 thousand people.

Industry Perspectives

It is believed that in general, Web 3.0, as a phenomenon, is the personalization of information and how to deliver it to the end user. Thus, with the increase in the information load on the average user, content filtering services are also evolving and gradually becoming more and more familiar.

The demand for such solutions will not decrease yet due to an increase in the number and thickness of information flows, the level of involvement of the average user in the Internet environment and the penetration of the Internet in modern society as a whole.

Indirectly, this proves an increase in the growth rate of the user base of services that solve the problems of aggregation and content filtering. So, if in 2008, at the peak of development, Delicious had 6 million (launched in 2003) users, Evernote now has about 25 million users (12 years of development), then Pinterest in its nine months of existence gained a base of 10 million people.

It can be assumed that the next step of such services will be the personalization of content based on social networks, high-quality visual presentation, deep implementation in mobile environments and the widespread use of semantic technologies. Evidence is also the fact that about 6 billion links per month are rated by users on Facebook.

The conclusion is obvious - never before has there been such a fertile ground for projects for working with content.