As I listened to Tariq Krim at ‘the Next Web’ give his vision of the NetVibes universe, I was struck with how similar his rap was to Yahoo’s Tapan Bhat’s rap on the future as well.

What I was witnessing were two different defintions of DLAs - which is exactly what I was writing about the other day and what I knew would transpire and evolve over time.

Each vendor (NetVibes and Yahoo in this case) has their own unique vision of how the meshed distributed decentralized world is going to play out. Each vendor has their own strategy and technology play to implement these visions. Each vendor has their own monetization and business model strategy and each wants others to mesh into their worlds.

Yme Bosma connects this all together with something Jon Udell recenly wrote on hosted life bits. Yme wants what everyone else wants - to connect all these ‘universes’ together. I call it a ‘master profile’. Hmmm - maybe we should implement something like that. Think so?

Persistent life bits are a key component of ‘master profiles’. But so are membership and participation in these disributed communities.

The problem with today’s people aggregators (Spock, Profile Linker, upScoop, etc.) is that these are services that are seperate from where your content and profile is - and the network you want to STAY on. With the exception of Profile Linker - none of these aggregation services offer the standard features folks want AND inter-connect their profiles together. This is the design challenge we’re trying to solve.

A distributed widgetsphere may be the answer. Something that could scrape MyBlogLog, mesh into Twitter, support Clearspring’s analytics, Upload to Wordpress, migrate from TypePad into Vox, tie into NetVibes’ universe and make Ray Ozzie very happy by bringing Microsoft into this world via shared micro-content and contacts. And I’d sure like to make Jerry Yang and Brad Horowitz happy too.

Jon Udell now works for Microsoft (after being at Infoworld for years) and is able to articulate a vendor agnostic vision - because Microsoft can afford to have smart people like Jon - think like that.

Notice we don’t hear from no Google guy about any of this stuff. Google is all about mine, mine, mine. We’re watching the reinvention of Microsoft before our eyes with folks like Kim Cmaeron, Don Box, Jeff Sandquist, Dare Obesanjo and Jon Udell.

Meanwhile we’re hard at work making all these ideas and technologies available to licensees and reseller partners - who then in turn will bring this functionality to the people. Turns out what we have is a DLA construction kit - available in source code or SaaS forms.

Doesn’t matter whether it’s “Ning-in-a-Box”, “MySpace-in-a-Box”, “Facebook-in-a-Box” or “Linked-in - in a box” - it’s all about bringing social to software.

This entry was posted on Saturday, June 2nd, 2007 at 1:43 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.