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 Plum and Spokeo. eTribes has a DLA focused on easy to use, entry level users - while Broadband Mechanics’ DLA - PeopleAggregator - is a construction kit for any kind of DLA.

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

Another important principle of DLAs is that they should leverage open standards to connect their end-users to other DLAs. By providing a seamless experience between disparate systems - the world of DLAs can create a distributed interconnected mesh that will allow any small vendor or creator to stand right next to any of the big boys and play right along with them.

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

DLAs are at the forefront of personal computing and will be a new cornerstone and ecosystem for all future computing platforms.

This entry was posted on Monday, April 9th, 2007 at 12:01 am 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.