In Favor (for once) of Conglomeration

As our global economy radically evolves, a balance must be struck between conglomeration and differentiation of services within both technological and general market realms. Facebook serves as a prime example of the former approach. The proliferation of third-party applications on its social-networking platform has allowed user interaction to advance beyond the mere water cooler exchange of “friending” people, sending messages and sharing photos into a concentration of social operations managed on a dashboard of centralized, personal organization. However, services directed toward individual use have also seen wide success. Google News, an application within Facebook, integrates the RSS service provided by Google in its Reader and Homepage features; weRead on Facebook similarly internalizes the services provided by the juggernauts Goodreads and LibraryThing, again allowing the user to conduct all business in one place. In the same way that smartphones have assimilated voice exchange, Internet access, banking, audio, still and video photography, and GPS mapping into one device, so has Facebook begun to conglomerate myriad Internet-based services into a one-stop-shop on its site. Media-maven Tim O’Reilly asserts, “[T]he future opportunity is less in Facebook applications per se, and more in the development of applications that use the social graph embodied in Facebook for entirely new purposes.” As developers continue to generate breathtakingly diverse applications, an individual’s habitual-use Internet traffic will center itself increasingly within Facebook to accomplish rote tasks.

What society stands to gain from such conglomeration is obvious. So, if one views streamlining as ultimately good (ignoring, for the sake of simplicity and brevity, such threats as monopolization and quality decrease), companies that rebel against such conglomeration by taking a broad need and differentiating between categories within that need to focus on a specific category become a concept of note, if not quizzical interest. In this context, the success of a service like PenguinDating remains questionable. Though powered by Match.com, PenguinDating, “where book lovers meet,” appears redundant when examined independently of its partnering site and services. The long-tail approach, though often astronomically successful in niche markets, doesn’t seem to be particularly relevant in the case of PenguinDating, namely because its singular service is accessible already via previously established sites like Goodreads and LibraryThing. Now, these sites do not provide dating services per se; however, as both social-networking sites aim to connect readers with similar interests and literary preferences, romantic connections arising from initial relationship development are imminent and likely quite common. Thus, though PenguinDating smartly customizes a service to a niche client base, the company misses the mark in that they differentiate between related activities – reading, socializing, relationship building, and dating – rather than conglomerate them, instead.

In other words, neither conglomeration nor differentiation supercedes the other in terms of overall superiority; but, differentiation does require that the customized services rendered be highly impenetrable to conglomerative forces. Because if people can combine as many functions as possible into one device or platform, they will.