I just met a flakey guy (no not THAT sort of flake) named Christoph Janz from a company called PageFlakes.

He pointed out to me that he had already referred to me in his announcement post and wanted to know how we could work together.

Well Wilkommen Christoph, here we go!  I thought I’d just post my reply publicly - so others like Tariq Krim of NetVibes and even AOL or Microsoft can also join in the conversation.

You see we’re all faced with this juggernaut of trying to compete with the big boys (even AOL sees MySpace as the ‘bigboy’.)  We may be nimble, and small, and innovative and quick to respond, but the lumbering dinosaurs of Yahoo, Microsoft and Google are sure to step on us - if we don’t get out of their way.

So instead of avoiding them - I say we go right at them!  Propose open standards and ideals - that if they don’t adhere to - our end-users will.  MySpace didn’t need permission from Friendster to focus on music - right?

So what are those open standards?  How can we inter-connect modules from disparate systems or trade profile info or media between systems. That’s what our clients wanna do - and those who enable them to do that - will win.

Those who attempt to use their systems to lock-in customers and prevent them from moving their data or content around - will lose.

Take a look at Multiply. They’re doing it right. In some ways.  They enable you to easily import your blog posts, photos or contact lists from all over the web.

But no where in Multiply can I find a similar way to EXPORT this data.

They don’t appear to have Open APIs, they export via .CSV - which is coolio, but not enough.

Multiply needs to reciprocate each import with an export.

And that’s the key to us working together.  I know Pageflakes has Open APIs - so let’s just make sure that you can write OUT data just as easily as you can suck it in.

That’s the key formula for all of us to be working together.  To connect the islands of the mesh into a collective archipelago - we all need to both import and export our end-user’s data.  That’s all.  It’s that simple.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 2nd, 2006 at 2:17 pm and is filed under . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.