Dana has posted a very nice piece on the essense of the ‘open source business‘ we’re fostering with the GoingOn Network.

But since I’m obsessed with getting the story and message right, for the sake of clarity:

1. I’m not rich. I used to be. I invested my money in what is now called DLAs. We’re harvesting those investments right now I made as far back as 1992. Hopefully I’ll be rich again - but not because I get to send my daughters to college - but because no one will respect my ideas unless they make shitloads of money. Unfortunately that’s the way of the world.

Oh BTW - one things for sure - I won’t be letting the same folks who made gobs of money off of me and my ideas last time - do that again. Once you’ve shunned me and blacklisted me or ignored me - you’re off my list. But that list is now FULL of smart, bright, resourceful, energetic, deserving people - ALL who are going to get over and cake out before this is all over.

2. I actually really like Joi - so it’s wrong for you to include him in this story. There’s plenty of other clueless entrepreneurs out there to pick on. Joi, Loic, Andrew and Barak are all out there hussling their asses off - exploiting 6A’s position and brand today - making good money. Sure they’re not as open as I’d like - but you should ask Anil what he thinks about you saying that 6A is not open. He’d go ballistic. Which would actually be kind of fun to watch and read.
Maybe Anil can list out all the things they consider that they’ve done that’s open. Like help create Atom. And I think that they think that their platform IS extensible via their plug-in architecture - just like Matt Mullenweg and the WordPress community extend their platform.

3. We didn’t just release GoingOn. We just announced it. Dana is an old enough of a hand to know there’s a big difference. Tony has this yearly conference so it was apropos for us to use that as a vehicle for getting the word out - but we’ll be silent until we can put up - which will probably (hopefully) by in about 3-4 months.

4. We appreciate having our social network compared to MySpace - but that’s where it should end. We’re not throwing raves, encouraging mating or in any way focused on teeny boppers or ‘young people’. We’re focused on business - small, large, corporations or independents - who need to communicate, market, sell and in general - act like adults.

5. And while we’re on the subject of SNS - GoingOn is not just that. Social networking is a feature. It’s about putting people into context. Just like CD ROMs, web access or (shudder) multimedia. I call this new category of products - DLAs (digital lifestyle aggregators.) Integration, aggregation and customization is at the core of these new kind of products. And in addition to social networking, there’s personal publishing (pushing into the realm of micro-content publishing), communication, mobile and media. ALL of these aspects together make up DLAs. All sitting on top of open standards.

6. It’s great that Dana got it right about GoingOn being an Identity Hub. It’s not ONLY an Identity Hub - but at least he got it right that we use Sxip - and other ID systems - to interconnect one’s various digital IDs tgoether (which are currently scattered throughout the web.) By combining all these ‘digital presenses’ together, we can provide whole new kinds of experiences and tools to end-users. Compelling experiences and useful, handy functionality is what it’s all about. So this is not a correction as much as a slight adjustment. In addition to being a Digital ID Hub, we’re also a micro-content publishing system, a meta-network and a kick-ass new tool! [Shhhhh: don’t let anybody know that we’re a new kind of tool - then we’ll start getting comapred to Macromedia/Adobe!]

7. We didn’t spend much time on the specifics of the standards and efforts we’re engaged in to help the ‘open community’ surrounding DLAs - and Dana doesn’t either. ourmedia.org is one. OpenEvents is another. Something around Tags is also on the radar. OpenReviews - too. Imagine shared servers that we all can contirbute to - which become part of an open source infrastructure.

8. Clearly Dana grokking the rise of the open source business process (as he calls it) is what’s important. Right on to Dana - thanks!

This entry was posted on Saturday, July 23rd, 2005 at 11:46 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.