Marc's Voice

Doing things in stages….

I just merged my Flickr account with my Yahoo account.   Though it didn’t merge the photos I’ve had in Yahoo Photos (for over five years now) it did do the correct ‘digital identity’ federation dance and inform me that I have to log-in via Yahoo from now on.

The system also informed me of the ramifications of merging these two accounts - like the fact that I’d have to re-download any fancy ‘Flickry’ applications I might use.

As some of you may know - there was quite an outburst when Yahoo originally tried to move the Flickr accounts into the Yahoo firewall.  What came out of all those complaints is a hybrid system which allows ‘those few’ to KEEP their Flickr accounts as is - as a sort of lingering in the past effort.

But that’s not what this post is all about.  What I wanted to talk about here is the need for transitional, incremental evolution in this complex Web 2.0 mesh we’re weaving.  Almost anything is possible, but it’s got to be done in stages.

For instance - one of our clients AOL is about to offer social networking to it’s 69M AIM users.  But they’re going about it - slowly and surely, adding just the most basic profile container pages - first.  Then once that transition is complete, more features and functionality will follow later.

Some of our other clients are also ‘gradually’ eating the Red Pill - taking a toe dip into the waters of social networking and openness - rather then jumping whole hog into the waters. There’s nothing wrong with being cautious (especially after so many were burned during Web 1.0.)

There’s also nothing wrong with going the ‘low-risk’ route, spending only $300k-$400k on a system, rather than the multi-millions required of Web 1.0 systems of this sort.  That’s one of the benefits our company (Broadband Mechanics) can offer, through the combination of outsourcing and open source.

Ideally once the toe has been dipped and the cautionary route has been taken, these vendors will find getting people to meet each other, form groups, upload their media, express themselves - is a good thing.  Then they’ll go further, evolving themselves trhough stages into their own particular context of what we call DLA (digital lifestyle aggregation.)

You see the difference between DLAs and portals - is that portals were executed so WELL by AOL and Yahoo - that they scared away all innovation and stifled the market - for 10 years now.  In Web 1.0 all portals looked virtually the same.

This time around each DLA will take on it’s own unique look and feel, structure and approach - much like 1UP.com, Tribe.net, Y! 360 and MySpace have established their own approaches.  This iterative approach - in stages - is key to evolving products and services that customers actualy want to enjoy and use.  That’s where the genius of Flickr comes in.

Flickr methodically added a new feature - every month - proving to their end-users that they were listening.  This is what we tell ALL our clients “get something up and running and out there - and then we’ll iterate and hone in on exactly what makes YOU different from the rest.”

We’re watching Apple right now - gradually evolve itself out of being a PC (meaning ‘personal computer’) company into a digitial convergence player.  They lie in public that they don’t wanna do video, but we all know that their cross-beams are aimed at TiVO and the Windows Media Center.

That’s the motherload of digital convergence - the home LAN and media in general.  For Apple to deny that is just a joke.

Anyway - I just wanted to get this ‘iterative stages’ post out there - as it’s one of our mantras and basic underlying technique in the process we call ‘building the open mesh’.

Next up - how open standards have a clear cut process and methodology for gaining acceptance.