Sean Bohan pointed me to an article in Advertising Age of recent attempts at ‘aggregating digital life’.  Sean knew this was my kind of article - signifying  a new level of awareness in DLAs (digital lifestyle aggregators.)

This article must have been instigated by MyLifeBrand’s recent launch - as it appears they hired some flacks to go out and bang the drum on this meme.

You can always tell when someone is spending money on flacks (that’s PR company for those of you who don’t know the phrase.) We saw this with a sudden burst of news on Ning and we’ll see it over and over again - as all that VC money gets shifted from development to marketing.

The article (by Beth Snyder Bulik) is interesting as it takes a fresh, naive viewpoint on an issue I’ve been grappling with for several years now.

What it really says to me is that customers ARE asking for the feature, even if they’re just “the dashboard-toting, widget-downloading, portal-page-personalizing, content-creating early adopter of all things new“, as John Noe of agency Rokkan is quoted as referring to us as.

That’s the coolio thing about early adopters - we DO tend to cluster in packs. Look at the feeding frenzy around Twitter right now. Not clear of that’ll matter elsewhere or Second Life. 6M registered users - but only 20k at a time.

One common thing folks ask me (usually in interviews) is “what if people DON’T want to consolidate or merge their profiles?” Well gee - I guess they shouldn’t then - right?

Since I’m in Italy - I’ll use the oft quoted story about new technology adoption. In 1988 - Italians were asked would they carry around some small device which would give them telephone capabilities and something like 85% said they WOULD NOT! I don’t have to tell you that today there are more cell phones than people in Italy right now.

So don’t always take what people say, as a true technology trend.

Yet Beth does bring up some good issues:

- super users spread the trends

- SixApart is a major player in all this (and Anil is quoted)

- consolidated spending makes it easier for advertisers to reach their potential customers and viewers

- and all of this leads us back to personal aggregators

- but will the small guys survive?

Of course since this is an article in AdAge all they seem to care about is vendors generating more ad dollars - and sure enough - lifestyle aggregators do not generate many page hits. In fact I hope they realize that a personal aggregator platform is NEVER really gonna generate many page hits - as its a personal viewing experience, not public. This is where NetVibes gets it right.

Certainly thinking of personal aggregators as one stop shopping, get to as many people a spossible - is obvious - but remember - that’s called lock-in. So the trick is gonna be “how do you on one hand provide the aggregation that folks want, while on the other hand - not become yet another lock-in scenario?” That’s what we’ve been grappling with.

That’s what I call the ‘aggregating the aggregator’ dilemna.

The growth and revenue opportunity in these ‘personal aggregators’ is not from page hits and ads - but in premium sub services. I really think that once the right formula is worked out and experience deleivered - folks WILL be willing to pay a few shekels for something coolio.

I would.

One good thing about this artcile - I got clued into two more of these plays - Profilatic and OtherEgo.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 19th, 2007 at 12:08 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.