UPDATE: the Site is back up. And we’re in the Times of India - today.

When I posted some announcements for our company’s progress and status in 2007, I added on a few predictions for 2008 - which is basically what I’ve been saying allot lately.

It seems that people appreciate my visioning, and I also appreciate the helpful suggestions and support. I also know that it was Dave Winer’s link that put us onto Techmeme - as its a slow night and Dave’s a powerful link to get. Even an off handed remark by Dave causes immense ripples throughout the blogosphere.

I guess using the direct approach for getting our message out there worked - as I spent all fall waiting for our clients to decide when they’d launch their products we built for them. As the EOY approached, I wondered where fate would take us - getting more and more pissed off, watching events unfold in 2007 like an unfolding dramatic chess game.

New efforts by Chris Messina, Brad Fitzpatrick, Dick Hardt, Dave Winer, David Recordon, Dare Obasanjo, Hooman Radfar, Tantek Celik, Joseph Smarr, OpenSocial, Facebook and others have exhilarated me to new levels - knowing that our PeopleAggregator platform would benefit from all their hard work.

What I really want folks to know is that we’re putting all this vision into our product - PeopleAggregator - and we won’t stop til we’re there. Any customers who license our platform from us (which is available for download) are along for the ride - as open standards and inter-connected social networks become a reality in 2008.

We sit downstream from all these efforts - absorbing aggregators, DLAs, master profiles, outliners, Twitter-dees and Twitter-dums, reputation systems, attention profiling, vendor relationship management, widget APIs, shared social graphs, profile standards and much more. To be a people aggregator - you’d better be able to aggregate the aggregators - and that’s what we intend to do.

But I have to do it in my own way. I can’t have my company stolen from me again - like what happened to Macromedia - back in 1992. I can’t let VCs tell me what to do, though good, truthful, intelligent investors are always welcome.

When we shipped Tribe.net the same week as MySpace (yet we had Groups - which we called Tribes) I thought that was just awful luck. But it was the MySpace parties and their wide range of activities and bands pages that differentiated MySpace and let them win the first battle of the SNSs.

When we launched ourmedia.org the same month as YouTube and saw what happened with viral public videos, that was a fulfillment of a dream I had back in the late 80’s - that one day video would be pervasive everywhere and folks with camcorders could just make their own videos - and become famous. Enter Ze Frank, Robert Scoble and Hugh Macleod - stage right.

But by YouTube showing us how the ease of use of FLVs could fulfill the ‘end-user video conundrum‘, they also locked us all into a proprietary video solution on the web.

When Facebook ‘opened up‘ it unleashed a torrent of developer support and uplifted Facebook to new levels, though we all knew they only went 98% of the way - ultimately locking all their users in just as much as MySpace does.

And when OpenSocial was leaked - I knew that fate was on our side - as the tide had turned and open was the new black. Little did I understand the power of Google - getting MySapce, Bebo, Friendster, hi5, LinkedIn, Salesforce, Oracle, etc, to all line up and support OpenSocial - all the while creating a diversionary FUD attack on Facebook Ads.

Now as we enter 2008 - I can tell you that the pieces of the puzzle are lining up, but we’re gonna need to educate users more as to the hoops they’ll have to jump through to gain control of their data. We can provide them the technology, but it’s going to be user behavior patterns and strong desire that will win this battle.

We also need to understand right now if MySpace et al - will really open up their social graphs and let their users move their data around freely - or if OpenSocial is really just OpenGadgets.

When I wrote up our press release and posted it today - little did I realize it’d be #3 on Techmeme.

What I hope is happening is that 2007 will prove to be the year we got our act together, became profitable and 2008 will be the year we get lots of funding (since we don’t need it now) and we can build our Persona Editor - which will sit on top of all the work we’re putting into PeopleAggregator.

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 27th, 2007 at 1:55 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.