Last week at an so-called executive update for a big publishing company I talked about YASNs in the context of communities and networks.

How YASNs are walled gardens.
How they often are positioning themselves as the ‘only’ channel of communication.
No export, no migrating your content, let alone your network, to another platform.

And then I heard myself say it:
They are also separating your real live networks and communities from their digital representation on-line.
That is why it is exciting to see services that allow you to take your digitally represented network with you into the physical world. With tools like Jaiku (and not Twitter!), Plazes and Imity, a bridge is build between your real world interaction and your on-line interaction. Augmenting each other, strengthening each other. They’re mobile clients as well as yasns.

The death of YASNs.
I’ve said it before, but this time I heard new meaning in my own words. The coin dropped so to speak.
So when PeopleAggregator is an answer to the walled gardens, and maintaining too many profiles…will it also start allowing me to take my network with me to the place where it matters: my physical world movements and face to face interactions? Marc? Paolo?

Or will the Plazes’s Jaiku’s and the Imity’s take yasns to the next stage of evolution?

I now wonder when I will be deleting my profiles at LinkedIn, Xing, Tribe or Hyves and such. On the other hand, I still have a profile at Orkut and Ryze…. 😉

3 reactions on “The Death of YASN As Usual

  1. We are working on it. You can already merge into your PA account your networks on Facebook and Flickr and we are developing additional solutions for several other services (check out the “External accounts” pages on http://www.peepagg.net).
    But of course, until YASNs will completely open up their API’s and there will be a common architecture to invite your friends from service to service, there won’t be “one click migration”.

  2. Hi Paolo,
    thanks for replying. I looked at the external app page, and tried hooking up Flickr and Facebook. Coolio concept as Marc would say :). Alas, it did not import data yet. Is the peepagg.net site the developing version?
    And mobile?

  3. Excellent post, Ton. I agree.
    Two spins:
    1) You’re talking about a form of augmented reality, perhaps a version of what I’m thinking of as “weak AR” (no goggles required). When the digital and the offline are this intertwined, some form of connection between the two, even a lamination, will build up.
    2) The gap between the US and the rest of the world for mobile devices will play a role in this. Maybe we’ll see more regional or continental practices, rather than global ones. And the US version will be limited and/or lame.

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