The rise of the DLA
My buddy Hooman Radfar - of Clearspring - has written a two parter on ‘Death of the Portal’ and ‘Birth of the Social Aggregator’. In these posts he rightly groks what’s up.
By coincidence I wrote the final section of our white paper today - on this very subject. Here it is - which will be part of our upcoming official white paper on PeopleAggregator:
Yahoo and AOL defined portals in the 1990’s. They were places where end-users were sold things, with search and basic customization of one’s start page offered as a bone for enticement. But the notion of what a portal is has morphed over the years and end-user destination /home pages are now perceived to be the #1 most important real estate to possess in the web. Many different approaches are taken to provide end-user’s ‘start pages’.
Search engines still are dominant start pages - and Google, Yahoo and Microsoft are building their brands on the back of this most basic of service. Huge advertising revenues are at stake, and incremental functionality like blogging, social networking, calendars, maps, answers, VoIP, IM and mobile services are being wrapped around the search start page.
Widgets and modular start pages are now also becoming the rave, with NetVibes and PageFlakes being leaders in this approach. But Microsoft and Google will simply provide this ‘drag-and-drop’ custom aggregator/start page functionality onto their search engine approaches - so being ‘just’ a widget start page will probably not be enough.
Mobile only solutions are available, as well as interfaces designed specifically for a Home Media/TV based environment. But these solutions often isolate the hardware and user - without properly connecting the end-user o the rest of the web.
Then there are the vertical portal approaches, which basically fine-tune a traditional portal approach to some specific vertical market or niche segment; like Dogster, NetFlix, or the myriad of new vertical social networks emerging everyday.
Blogging and social networking platforms are available in almost every combination, feature set and approach - from Xanga and LiveJournal - which are hybrid blogging/social networking environments, to feature specific networks like Tagged, Plazes or Last.fm.
The one thing that all of these products and services have in common is that they all have profile pages for their users and they attempt to connect their users together - thus creating the social web.
Digital Lifestyle Aggregation (DLA) takes the notion of the social web and applies some principles, goals and vision to these new ‘portals 2.0 experiences’. Digital lifestyle aggregators are he new portals 2.0 and they come in every shape, flavor and guise. Some may appear to be social networks - like MySpace or Facebook, while others still appear more like bogging platform - like VOX. NetVibes and PageFlakes are DLAs, as are other new kinds of aggregators - like
But above all - DLAs are a means and mechanism for delivering compelling experiences to end-users which will connect together with other DLAs.
Architecturally DLAs are:
- integrated platforms
o which provide a wide range of apps, services and content in one interface
o feature built-in constructs which connect everything together (IM, media galleries, events, etc.)
o connect devices, locales, tools and vendors together
o present this integrated environment all within the context of ‘multiple personae’ and an ‘ID Hub’
- aggregation engines
o which bring together any set of events, reviews, people, content or information - in any form
o which enable one to ‘subscribe to another person’ - or any part of that person’s digital lifestyle
o bring together all of one’s personas and ID information - in one place
o connect together disparate operating systems, platforms, locales or information sources
- highly customizable environments
o which empower an end-user to control their user interface look and feel
o control what modules or functions one can access and under what circumstances others can access their profile and content - as well
o enable end-users to decide which of their external accounts, personas or systems they wish to bring in and merge with the rest of their digital lifestyle information
o which also adopt to an end-users ability level, age or sex or even demographic
At the basic foundation of open standards support are open identity systems - typified by OpenID. By supporting OpenID - any DLA will enable its end-users to create a safe, secure authenticated single sign-on experience. But this is only the basic foundation.
The next level up the stack is the Import/Export of any end-user’s content, information or profile data. This can be facilitated by supporting the OpenID attribute exchange. This burgeoning new standard will safely and securely enable OpenID enabled end-users to move their data into any other ‘attribute exchange enabled’ site or platform. PeopleAggregator will be supporting the OpenID attribute exchange.
But even Import/Export is just scratching the surface of what can be done by inter-connecting social networks and blogging platforms. Broadband Mechanics is working on many of these new concepts for ‘actions; or verbs’ between disparate systems.
So far we have identified:
- auto-invite - (take a list of friends and invite them into a new system)
- create a relationship - directly with someone who is on a different network
- merge - relations, content, meta-data, etc. - from one account into another account
- send a private message - to someone on another network
- post content - from one platform to another network or platform
- create or join a group - between networks
- aggregate - information, data, profiles, content - from different networks into one place
- update - master profile
Marc
Great whitepaper and good post BTW on death of portals. Dont you view pageflakes, netvibes as portals in some way though? Are we just splitting hairs?
Marc
Great whitepaper and good post BTW on death of portals. Dont you view pageflakes, netvibes as portals in some way though? Are we just splitting hairs?
Marc
Great whitepaper and good post BTW on death of portals. Dont you view pageflakes, netvibes as portals in some way though? Are we just splitting hairs?
Great timing and great post. Mukund, I do not think he is splitting hairs. It is an important distinction that will lead to vastly different approaches in design.
Great timing and great post. Mukund, I do not think he is splitting hairs. It is an important distinction that will lead to vastly different approaches in design.
Great timing and great post. Mukund, I do not think he is splitting hairs. It is an important distinction that will lead to vastly different approaches in design.
Marc, you might have pointed out that none of what your discussing here is new, it’s just that it would be best to systematize it and have it become a ubiquitous set of functionality rather than one-offs. For example, today users on Yahoo!’ IM can communicate seemlessly w/users on MSN’s Messenger. Today one can use LinkedIn or any of several social networks and import one’s e-mail address list either from Outlook or from Yahoo! Mail, Google’s Gmail or MSN’s Hotmail, in order to facilitate the invite functionality. But as we see over and over again, this is dependent on the developers of each service to build this functionality from scratch, each works differently, and there’s tons of development and data redundancy all over the place. The DLA metaphor appeals to me because it elaborates an architecture to normalize of all of these common activities that no longer gain any advantage from being silo’d. There’s no longer a strategic advantage in being able to easily grab my Outlook contact database into any social network since they all do it now, so why not open that up and make a generic way for any of service to get at it. Same with moving or inviting my friends from one social network to another, or even if it only moves a representation of them while keeping their profiles on the social network they prefer. Let’s blow them walls up!!!
Thanks for sharing.
Marc, you might have pointed out that none of what your discussing here is new, it’s just that it would be best to systematize it and have it become a ubiquitous set of functionality rather than one-offs. For example, today users on Yahoo!’ IM can communicate seemlessly w/users on MSN’s Messenger. Today one can use LinkedIn or any of several social networks and import one’s e-mail address list either from Outlook or from Yahoo! Mail, Google’s Gmail or MSN’s Hotmail, in order to facilitate the invite functionality. But as we see over and over again, this is dependent on the developers of each service to build this functionality from scratch, each works differently, and there’s tons of development and data redundancy all over the place. The DLA metaphor appeals to me because it elaborates an architecture to normalize of all of these common activities that no longer gain any advantage from being silo’d. There’s no longer a strategic advantage in being able to easily grab my Outlook contact database into any social network since they all do it now, so why not open that up and make a generic way for any of service to get at it. Same with moving or inviting my friends from one social network to another, or even if it only moves a representation of them while keeping their profiles on the social network they prefer. Let’s blow them walls up!!!
Thanks for sharing.
Marc, you might have pointed out that none of what your discussing here is new, it’s just that it would be best to systematize it and have it become a ubiquitous set of functionality rather than one-offs. For example, today users on Yahoo!’ IM can communicate seemlessly w/users on MSN’s Messenger. Today one can use LinkedIn or any of several social networks and import one’s e-mail address list either from Outlook or from Yahoo! Mail, Google’s Gmail or MSN’s Hotmail, in order to facilitate the invite functionality. But as we see over and over again, this is dependent on the developers of each service to build this functionality from scratch, each works differently, and there’s tons of development and data redundancy all over the place. The DLA metaphor appeals to me because it elaborates an architecture to normalize of all of these common activities that no longer gain any advantage from being silo’d. There’s no longer a strategic advantage in being able to easily grab my Outlook contact database into any social network since they all do it now, so why not open that up and make a generic way for any of service to get at it. Same with moving or inviting my friends from one social network to another, or even if it only moves a representation of them while keeping their profiles on the social network they prefer. Let’s blow them walls up!!!
Thanks for sharing.
Marc,
Good post. There’s so many things that a DLA can really touch on or improve for everyone. Glad to see this sector is heating up more and more each month. After all competition fuels innovation. The day when you can join a social network and not have to upload 50 pictures that you already have uploaded on xyz.com. The day when you don’t have to start from 0 and build a new friend list when existing friends are already on xyz network. The day when you don’t have to join another social network “just because”….. I use to think that day was far off but as each day passes I know we’re just one step away. Can’t wait to read the white paper and good stuff as always.
-Brian
http://www.ProfileLinker.com
Marc,
Good post. There’s so many things that a DLA can really touch on or improve for everyone. Glad to see this sector is heating up more and more each month. After all competition fuels innovation. The day when you can join a social network and not have to upload 50 pictures that you already have uploaded on xyz.com. The day when you don’t have to start from 0 and build a new friend list when existing friends are already on xyz network. The day when you don’t have to join another social network “just because”….. I use to think that day was far off but as each day passes I know we’re just one step away. Can’t wait to read the white paper and good stuff as always.
-Brian
http://www.ProfileLinker.com
Marc,
Good post. There’s so many things that a DLA can really touch on or improve for everyone. Glad to see this sector is heating up more and more each month. After all competition fuels innovation. The day when you can join a social network and not have to upload 50 pictures that you already have uploaded on xyz.com. The day when you don’t have to start from 0 and build a new friend list when existing friends are already on xyz network. The day when you don’t have to join another social network “just because”….. I use to think that day was far off but as each day passes I know we’re just one step away. Can’t wait to read the white paper and good stuff as always.
-Brian
http://www.ProfileLinker.com
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