John Battelle’s Searchblog has a post today discussing the new social site Fanpop. He summarizes the service as:
Fanpop may standout, however, by picking the best qualities from a number of leading social sites and bringing them together in a neat integration. As they say, "We’re a little bit of Digg, MySpace, Yahoo! Groups, del.icio.us and Yelp all mixed into one."
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There are many social sites out there, too much to all survive, but aggregating the best features from specialized social sites may help this start-up rise to face the the largest player(s).
To me, this brings the question, ¨if you continue to aggregate features from various services, where do you stop¨, to mind. In other words, why will there not be a next service which integrates all of the services in Fanpop, along with a few other/newer services? Can it crate a vicious, redundant cycle of unnecessary innovation.
This is a question that the team at GROU.PS needs to keep in mind.
Cem Sertoglu 
In our case, we have modules and each module abstracts semantically related services. So the Photos module will only abstract photo sharing sites. If a photo sharing site abstracts existing sites, we can abstract it too; the purpose is to cover every possible service provider in the world. Because Flickr may be very popular in USA but probably Chinese folks have their own version of Flickr and only use it. And yes this purpose may seem too ambitious and unachievable… However our primary target is to get more popular and become an attraction center for service providers. So that we can only work on our framework and let them create bindings via the APIs that we will publish.
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