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Google tells me today that I am for the moment the world's foremost expert on SOA-based social-network aggregation, so I figured I'd better have more to say on that topic. Fortunately, I do.

First, a little further review of the existing literature:

• Wikipedia has a good summary of the standard sort of social-network aggregators you'll find out there, but as I said before, they are all going about it with the master portal approach.
• Calvin Powers wrote a great piece on composition and RSS feeds, with a very cool data flow graphic of how he personally aggregates his information. He suggests the similarity to a service-oriented architecture, so I am heartened that other people think it makes sense, yet surprised that it's not being talked about more.
• Ron Miller writes about the link between SOA and content management, based on a discussion with Joshua Michele-Ross. Again, a suggestion of the link, but no talk of anyone actually doing it.

So I think I'm onto something here, and if you stick with me, we'll see if anything interesting comes out of it.

One aspect which I am still wondering about is the motivation factor. I can't help but think that any sustainable SOA infrastructure is going to require monetization, if only to cover operational costs. There are still many fledgling movements in the field of micropayments, but the only one that currently seems like it could gain any traction in the near term is Amazon's Flexible Payment System. People already trust the brand, so they'd be willing to put some money into an Amazon Payments account. I'm frankly shocked that PayPal seems to have fallen behind on this, but I guess they are milking much bigger cows since they acquired VeriSign's payment division.

But since there is no clear winner just yet, I will run my proof-of-concept with a dummy micropayment service. If the architecture is sound, it shouldn't be a chore for me (or any good developer for that matter) to map that service to a real payment service provider. That's what I'm trying to promote here: the ability to start small and evolve organically.