Digital Lifestyle Aggregators

Go to Google and search for "software" + "Home LAN" and you'll find stuff to manage Internet Connections and share printers.  You might also find some early stuff which connects your TV and stereo to your PC - but it's still pretty flakey.

Ask a human what's digital, and they'll say "Cable TV/Satelite, videogames, cell phones, PCs and....." just about everything else that uses a microprocessor and RAM.  But we all know that in fact, each of those worlds is a completely separate industry, with its own business models, major players, installed bases, trade shows and magazines, analysts, and poor schmuck users - who seem to consistently get hard to use interfaces, buggy code, shitty content or unfulfilled promises.

Imagine a software platform - that could intermix various building blocks - like web services, user interfaces, message boards, databases, PIMs, social networks, blogging tools, data aggregators, streaming and spidering technologies and a host more - and work together like it was designed and architected by one company.

That's what a digital lifestyle aggregator will do.

But let's get specific - how will a digital lifestyle aggregator work - for me?  For MY family?

Well first of all, Mom and Dad will want to set up the whole family's interfaces - from the kids and close relatives, to remote grandparents, old friends and colleagues.  This 'family' represents the inner core of your digital lifestyle - and might as well just be YOU - as you don't have to 'invite' these folks in. They ARE you.

This family has relationships with other familys - as we humans all travel in packs.  That's why social networking is so cool, but just the tip of the iceberg.  We're just starting to enter the thrid stage of 'on-line communities' after message boards (gen 1) and blogging (gen 2.)  Social Networking (gen 3) enables us to cross-polinate and interact with individuals, groups and completely fuzzy notions of reputation, trust and semantics.

It's this expanded notion of who YOU are (the family) - which forms the basis of digital lifestyle aggregation. The only way we'll truly be able to get a handle on and control all our PCs, machines, Home LAN details and remote locations (where you use PCs or handheld devices) - is to work together with every member of your family as if you were one.

OF COURSE each family member will have their own library of music, books, videos , etc. - but who the hell wants to buy the same piece of content twice? And won't we all want to share our videocams, family photos, shopping lists, printers, digital cameras, MIDI gear, PVRs, DVD burners, recipe databases, mailing lists and family 'books'?

And needless to say - not all family members have the same ability level and experience with all these technology doo-dahs, so our software will want to adapt itself to who teh end-user is - and provide them with appropriate levels of control and functionality.

So take all of these elements - and the web servcies, tools and system I talked about in the introductory blog post and you've got digital lifestyle aggregation.