OK - I gotta blog - right now

Too many big things happening for me to ignore. Needless to say we’ve been heads down closing up this version of PeopleAggregator. We’ll be doing a formal press release, announcing Angel investment, clients and resellers and an Indian office opening.

My efforts at AOL are paying off for all of us. No I can’t claim full credit - but I helped. They’ve announced that they’re supporting OpenID. Congrats to John
Panzer
and everyone else involved!

I now have two verifications that Cisco got burned to the tune of $25M-$30M when they bought Five Across. I wonder who did the deal - cause I got a bridge to sell him!

Autoquake will put you into the ‘driver’s seat. Buy - Sell cars in the UK. Save time and money.
Gaurav discovered a great post on MySpace scalability.

Jubii is a trusted environment.

Krugle Powers Code Search for YDN - congrats to Steve Larsen

I’ve been reading Ivan Pope’s blog - from Sniperoo.

He’s got lots of coolio things to say like:

- Social Networking by API

This one is key as Ivan’s company is a widget platform - that benefits from systems interconnecting together via APIs. In other words - he’s my kind of guy!
Well that’s why we have TWO kinds of APIs in PeopleAggregator! We’ve got the web services/mashup crowd covered with XML-RPC and REST calls - via http. These are what most people refer to as Open APIs - and you can BET ours are two-way!

We also have deep internal php5 calls - which are APIs for our entire user interface. Because of our nightmare experiences with Drupal we’ve architected the PeopleAggregator to completely decouple the backend from the user interface. So when we move to V 1.3 - all of our V 1.2 user interfaces and live systems will be able to lift off the old code base, and plop down on top of the new backend. Database, memberships and content in place.

So that means that deep calls are available for every construct, class, database structure and system verb - that can be integrated ino any other codebase or legacy system. That’s the way we’ve been thinking about PeopleAggregator from the outset - a social networking and blogging platform - via APIs.

- Widgify

This is a post starting off talking about my buddy Hooman Radfar’s Clearspring company and Hooman’s posts on Web 3.0 at his blog - Widgify. DISCLOSURE: Clearspring is a client of ours and we share investors.

Keeping with my recent “just grab the whole dam thing and reprint it” actions - here’s Ivan’s post on Hooman and Widgets as DLAs:

Hooman from Clearspring but at Widgify has gone all philisophical on atomisation. Having just come back from talking on ‘Blowing up the Web’ (into its atomic or constituent parts, on the basis that they would then reform into the combinations that the users wanted) at LIFT in Geneva, I’m on the same wavelength:

As the web continues to become disaggregated, there will be a burgeoning demand for tools that can help users effectively leverage these “information atoms,” together in a meaningful manner. Not only will there be a need for tools that help users aggregate widgets, but also tools that enable widgets to work together. Imagine a world where there are as many widgets as there are web pages. Won’t it suck royally if they don’t work together?

Tools like Netvibes, Pageflakes, and Uber represent the next generation of content aggregation platforms. Marc Canter has dubbed these tools as Digital Lifestyle Aggregators, or DLAs. DLAs will enable users to manage their content and services across platforms (desktop, web, mobile) and even across social networks.

Digital Lifestyle Aggregators will certainly form part of the hosting landscape - though I think it’s certain that their form and function will change radically in short order. The current DLAs are little more than closed silos which all promote a single worldview and all control rather than promote the use of widgified content. There’s little reason why the widgets themselves aren’t the dominant method of managing content, i.e. widgets, in the next generation DLAs. A framework into which to throw widgets will be all we need - the intelligence will be of our choosing and will be embedded by means of widgets. And what a widgetsphere that will be. Hooman posits widgets that can talk to eachother. For sure - widgets that are created from APIs and Pipes and scrapers and applications will talk to eachother. This is the widgetsphere that we’re currently building between ourselves.


I’m sorry - that’s just too dam coolio - I had to repint the whole dam thing!

Widgets are the battering ram for social networking sandcastles - Ross Mayfield

And finally I’d like to acknowledge that Paul Montgomery is right and that he should now look at our new V 1.2pre1 - which is just been put up at our public wiki. Paul was playing with our version from last September and he was correct in every complaint he had. And this new version - just about fixes everything he complains about.

10 Responses to “OK - I gotta blog - right now”

  1. Ivan Says:

    RE: grab it all and reprint it - Marc, you are most welcome.

  2. Snipperoo Says:

    Widgets are the battering ram for social networking sandcastles

    Ross Mayfield says Widgets are the battering ram for social networking sandcastles But the next YouTube wont be video, and stuff comes from all angles when users are empowered to paste Javascript. Smaller players will make this even easier, with

  3. Scripting News for 2/18/2007 « Scripting News Annex Says:

    […] in Scripting News at 6:44 am by Dave Winer It’s great to see Marc Canter get the recognition he deserves. It’s been a long road for him, a lot of the pundits are put […]

  4. Anonymous Says:

    Here’s a link to the announcement of the pre pre pre release, v1.2pre1: http://www.myelin.co.nz/post/2007/2/19/#200702191

    You can download it from http://update.peopleaggregator.org/ right now!

  5. Brian Dixon Says:

    Aol + OpenId = “That’s kind of a big deal”…. Wowzers! Good stuff Marc.

  6. StyleFeeder Widget, Yaplet, WorldCat, Netvibes Updates, TrialPay, WhatShouldISay, PlayInterChange, Google Video Says:

    […] $30 million - Marc Canter said over the weekend that Cisco may have paid $25-$30 million for the social networking provider […]

  7. GigaOM » Cisco buys XML startup Reactivity Says:

    […] company for $830 million in January, and more recently picked up Five Across, a CMS maker for a rumored $30 million. (That’s a billion dollar buying binge already and we are not even out of February. VCs, […]

  8. Quasi.dot » Blog Archive » Cisco e Five Across Says:

    […] “community” e “social network”. La cosa me l’ero dimenticata. Poi ho letto sul blog di Marc Canter che l’avrebbero pagata dai 25 ai 30 milioni di dollari. Sto pensando […]

  9. Nuclear Sledgehammer » Blog Archive » You mean it wasn’t worth $1.6 billion? Says:

    […] Cisco bought both Five Across - a company whose name is even a pastiche of another, whose product apparently sucks - as well as Tribe, a network that has to resort to plastering its pages with Google […]

  10. Elza Says:

    Very+cool+design%21+Useful+information.+Go+on%211