Straight No Chaser Tom - gets it wrong - when he thinks that DLAs are just another “portal” or a place to park (or the implied lock-in) store one’s content and profile info inside our system.

In fact its the opposite.  We’re exactly what Tom wants and asks for:

….the last thing I need is another blog (I have 8, at last count). What I need is a place to organize all my online habits that is centralized and service-independent. I don’t need another service wanting to be my “digital lifestyle aggregator“. Why have someone else to do that for me? What I need to do is take what I already have and make it what it really needs to be: the one stop Tom shop. Isn’t that what homepages were for to begin with?

Please don’t confuse the fact that we CAN store media, empower you to blog with structuredblogging or provide you easy ways to move your data IN; but we can also provide you ways to move your data OUT - to anywhere you wanna be, post to, make friends with or in some otehr way “exist in cyberspace”.

As it is with all web services, you really need to keep them symetrical at all times.  In other words - what goes in, can also come out. Or vice versa.

DLA s are sort of like that old tool ‘debabelizer’ - which could convert from one format to any other format - for images.  Only we do that for social networks and personal publishing.

Tom later went onto to say that he discovered SuperGlu:

UPDATE: Wow, take a look at Suprglu (here’s mine). Pretty much just what I was talking about, but rolled into a service. If you had more control over the layout, then it would be great. I could still totally see a suite of apps rolled into a server-side script for installation on your own site as being a killer-app, though.

SuperGlu, Pageflakes, NetVibes - they all achieve this ‘hands off’ effect by not giving you inherent storage, profile or authoring capabilities. 

I say - “give it to them if they wanna use it, but all give them the power to link externally to these modules and remote accounts”.  Let the end-user decide - is our mantra - and the more options and possibiltiies - the more customers we’ll get.

Final note - that post of Tom;’s was dated Dec. 4th 2005 - but Technorati just told me about it - today.

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