I have been asked three times now - by smart people - to change the term “PeopleAggregator“. And Jon Husband just left an intelligent comment noting that ‘digital lifestyle aggregation’ is too confusing and technical.

Well let me share with you - what I answered to Jon in email:

Every time someone complains of the terms DLA or even the name PeopleAggregator itself - I smile.

What they don’t know is that we have two resellers already signed up - with 3 more in negotiation - who are licensing our code (Read: MONEY, BUSINESS MODEL) to white label what we have and call it their own term.

See if I care what they call it - as long as their checks don’t bounce.

We’re fighting to keep attribution on these sites, but we’ll at least be able to brag and say “here’s what we got for sale, here’s the folks who are uysing it so far and if you don’t like our term, call it whatever you want - just pay here”.

I think of DLA as a academic, sophisticated, analytical way to explain what’s going on. That doesn’t mean that SixApart set out to create a DLA or that Tom at MySpace thinks he has one or Tariq at NetVibes.

They’re each doing their own thing.

The cool thing is that Simon Grice at eTribes figured he had nothing to lose, so he’s calling eTribes a DLA. Coiolio - thanks Simon. I agree. Though eTribes is a clien of ours, they built their own codebase on top of Drupal and have nothing to do with us - except that we love each other.

The term DLA will get taught at places like CMU, NYU, MIT, USC, Satna Cruz, Stanford and Berkeley. I’d even like to see the program at UBC get there.

But the market will call it MyYahoo, SixApart’s VOX, Google Pages or Microsoft Live Spaces. And folks like NetVibes will struggle with their business model. They’re hard pressed to come up with a model that matches their VC valuation!

Yah can’t have a high valuation company without actual money getting deposited in the bank.

Simon’s got a model, eCademy, Xing, Multiply and others as well. Xing is an example of where they started with a technical name - like OpenBC and now they’re migrating to a customer facing moniker - Xing.

You need a clear context as well. There’s no way any of these 100’s of SNS you hear geting annoiunced every day are gonna survive. They’re each rolling their own platform, raising the stakes, promising the world to their investors. But the world can only stand so many giant centralized databases of people.

So the key is to keep you initial investor low, keep your ambitions in check and set a scope and ambition level appropriate to the context which you wanna play in. Our platform gives developers that opportunity.

But besides that - its all good. There’s no way you can build a wrong DLA. Success is defined by your ambition and ROI metrics. If it only costs you $50,000 to build, then you don’t need 100,000 paying customers.

And meanwhile we may change the name or terms later - but for now I can directly tie back to writings and postings that are 3- 4 years old and say “I told yah so”.

Our next milestone is to make sure 10-15 of these systems ship - EACH ONE it’s own thing. With a common core of the same source code and standards at its base.

That’s what WE’RE doing.

You see years ago I figured out that ANY term or fad had to have an author - an originator. That’s what original thinkers do - come up with new stuff. But anything that’s created by one man, like RSS - takes on an ego and gets associated with some agenda - even if its NOT an agenda.

My answer to all this - was to come up with something that obvioiusly was NOT a marketing moniker. Its a technical explanation. A stake in the ground of what we’re all trying to achieve. Solve convergence.

Then - once we all can coalesce around and agree to open standards and educated customers, we can branch off in a 1,000 directions - each of us developing our own marketing monikers, viral camnpaigns and killer app features.

So to be official - Digital Lifestyle Aggregator or aggregation is not a marketing moniker. Its not a term that will get put onto bus stop ads, glossy magazine ads or TV commercials. It is NOT soemthing we use to end-users.

DLA is a technical explanation, a point of reference for standards and a white label solution - so that companies like Broadband Mechanics (and others) can provide open source infrastructure - for tomorrow.

Same goes with PeopleAggregator - BTW.

That’s the business we’re in. We don’t necessarily offer our technology directly to end-users (though we might in the future.) We design, architect, build and host solutions for customers who bring with them their own assets, resources, context, brand and checkbook. They can then choose to have us help them host, maintain, upgrade and support this technology and in some cases - we’re even helping our customers market their solution.

But in general - we are an infrastructure company - standing behind the throne like some consigliare, whispering secret notions into our customers ears, who then take that advice and run with it.

My blog is where I take those secret notions - and make them public.

UPDATE: Lee Bryant likes the term DLA - and he uses it when he refers to one’s online threads within a social networking profile. This also leads me to think about ProfileLinker, Plum, Spokeo, Klostu and dabble. All of these excellent services represent new kinds of aggregators - other forms of DLAs.

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 28th, 2007 at 12:08 pm 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.