For years I’ve been spouting off about something I call ‘Digital Lifestyle Aggregators’ (DLAs).

Now that the Facebook platform genie is out of the bottle I can finally disclose some of the design principles and underlying tenets behind DLAs, using Facebook as an example.

You see in a world where you give your ideas away, where patents and copyrights mean nothing and where the very nature of competition has radically changed - I decided to play coy and keep my definitions of DLAs fairly nebulous and vague. For anyone to understand what the hell I was I was talking about - I needed clear examples.

Facebook is that example. PeopleAggregator will be another one.

As I said in an earlier post - PeopleAggregator is ‘Facebook in a box’ - for any brand, ISP, software vendor or virtually anyone else to offer their OWN DLA to the public, or within he private confines of their own firewall. The giant chess game surrounding white labeled social networks has shifted to a new level. Now ALL platforms have to be open. Now ALL platforms have to let their end-user’s control their own data and content.

Now ALL white label social networking platforms have to integrate activities and features, aggregate all sorts of information and people and provide high levels of customization to their end-users.

And we have Facebook to thank for this!

In the past I’ve talked about DLAs being the next generation of portals. I’ve told the story of how Microsoft and Apple dominated the platform wars in the 1980’s and how the 1990’s were dominated by Portals 1.0 - from Yahoo and AOL. Now in the ‘oughts’ we have a five or six major players, all vying for dominance, end-user loyalty and lock-in. Well I sure as hell hope that they realize that this game ain’t over with yet!

It may take a few more years, but end-users are not so stupid that they’ll allow themselves to stay locked up within these data silos and centralized databases.

That’s why Facebook is taking a different approach.

The new lock-in, is no lock-in.

By providing end-users with the freedom to move and support them in their choices to join whichever networks they wish to join, future platforms will accept the fact that humans are migratory beasts. We’ll all be members of multiple networks. DUH!

The only trick now is how to interconnect these DLAs together while keeping vendors business models in tact and money flowing.

I see each separate DLA, social web app and service as a kind of ‘island’ and the open standards we’re developing as the means to connect these islands together. Think of the standards as bridges or causeways between each island.

So to summarize and not be nebulous anymore: ”

DLAs are the notion of an open platform that embraces:

• Integration
• Aggregation
• Customization

and open standards to inter-connect the platform to other DLA platforms.

That’s what Facebook is and what others need to do to succeed in the future.

Now let’s look at Facebook as a DLA and what is probably going to happen over the next few years.

Based upon everything I just mentioned above, we can now look at Facebook in a new light. No longer is Facebook simply a social networking platform.

It is a DLA - in every sense of the word. It integrates a wide range of activities and services - and will serve as a platform for 100’s if not 1,000’s of social web apps and services.

Facebook also aggregates all sorts of feeds and information together - and I’d look for a full featured RSS aggregator to be included in the system before too long.

One will be able to ‘subscribe’ to people, to keep track of people, to aggregate activities of all your friends, and track all your favorite bloggers and feeds. New kinds of micro-communities will form, much like what MyBlogLog and Twitter are doing today.

And this will all happen inside of Facebook.

And Facebook is also defining the state of the art of customization. After having NetVibes and Pageflakes set the litmus of customization in the past year, Facebook will quickly surpass those platforms, bringing not only feeds and web services into one’s own ‘personal desktop’, but also allow for CSS skinning, external themes and templates and a myriad of other new forms of customization.

All this clearly defines what DLAs are supposed to be - but it’s really only the beginning.

Because DLAs have to be open and connect to other DLAs. There HAVE to be other DLAs in the world, to provide all those niche vertical markets, demographics and target customers with micro-communities of their own. No mater how successful and big Facebook gets, it’s still a giant centralized network. What the world needs are 100,000s of smaller, distributed networks - NOT owned by Mark Zuckerberg et al.

So for Facebook to ‘win’ they need to keep this vision clear and enable all these smaller networks, providing them with access to their users profiles, enabling all these smaller networks full access to Facebook’s APIs and partner services - and a mesh of inter-connected vendor’s networks will flourish!

That’s the ‘open-standards’ part of the DLA equation. Clearly not everything will happen inside of Facebook. I want to subscribe to people who are NOT inside of Facebook. I want to route my blog posts wherever the hell I want them to go. I want to join groups, send messages, establish ‘friendships’ - across different vendors’ networks.

DLAs will inter-connect with other DLAs based upon the open standards which we’ve started today - with OpenID. These open standards will mesh content, people, presence, communications and even meatspace together - into one glorious open world!

While we’re at it I should point out that DLAs have to cleanly integrate in the living with various forms of consumer electronics, the world of television and radio and gateway over to mobile and auto based computing as well.

DLAs are the solution for convergence, a way to bring together all the aspects of one’s digital lifestyle into one comprehensive, distributed open platform made up of multiple vendor’s products and services.

So if you’re wondering why I’ve been ranting about DLAs for years - its because I knew that some enlightened vendor would one day appear - who would BOTH be open and provide a comprehensive platform for others to play and prosper in.

That’s Facebook’s strategy and it’s right on! But they won’t be the last and only DLA. Just the first true DLA.

Now let’s see what Microsoft, Yahoo and AOL do.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 29th, 2007 at 10:09 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.