I'm not sure that I've articulated here before the strong relationship that I believe exists between personal information managers (PIMs) and digital lifestyle aggregators (DLAs). To some extent, it's pretty obvious but I think some interesting things emerge from thinking about it.
Here are some random thoughts:
Numerous object types that were once the domain of PIMs are now being shared and aggregated: address books, calendars, etc. Things like music and photos should be included there too—although we don't tend to call the tools for managing them PIMs, they are.
The address book in my PIM should be seamlessly integrated with my published FOAF which should be seamlessly integrated with sites like LinkedIn. The address book should actually be the hub of a lot of stuff. Why not manage who can see my Flickr photos via my address book?
The merging of PIMs and DLAs means that we are increasingly creating our own personal intranets and extranets.
Communication is moving outside of email—discussions are taking place via blogs, photos are being exchanged via Flickr rather than email attachments, documents are being collaborated on via wikis. Atom/RSS feeds already change what I need email for—that should be taken to a whole other level.
One component of PIMs I'd like to integrate more with my website as well as aggregator sites I use is the whole project/task/todo aspect. I should be able to tie email, blog entries, photos, documents together into projects. "Tags" should span sites. Topics should have URIs.
I should be able to expose the status of certain projects/tasks to interested parties via a website (with a feed of course). Certain people: my boss, the team lead of an open source project I'm working on, a user of software I've written - should be able to submit requests via my website and have them integrated with my PIM.
UPDATE (2004-09-25): On that last point: they should also being able to just blog their request and ping me via a trackback. No reason why I have to own their request.
by : Created on Sept. 25, 2004 : Last modified Feb. 8, 2005 : (permalink)
Previously on this blog, I've called for a separation of hosting from aggregation. I want to be able to maintain authoritative data on one site and have other sites use it for their aggregation.
When I read Ted Leung's entry Microcontent personality disorder and Steve Mallett's comments on it, my immediate thought was that they could both have what they want if we could separate where we host our data with where it is aggregated and made "social".
Marc Canter (whose work around Digital Lifestyle Aggregators is definitely worth following) responds to Steve Mallett. Marc is spot on that people have their information all over the place. But I still believe that if systems are built to support a separation between hosting and aggregation, they'll support both the distribution of primary data and the kind of "self-hosting" that a certain segment like Steve and myself want.
Bottom line is all combinations of centralized/decentralized hosting/aggregation should be possible.
It's not that hard to do. Sites that aggregate just need to provide a mechanism where users can point to their data hosted somewhere else rather than have to re-enter their data in multiple aggregators. Aggregators then keep customers based on the value of their aggregation, not the lock-in of being the hosts of people's valuable data. People who want hosting for their pictures, blogs, etc can use hosting services to do it. But their choice of hosting service should not impact their participating in aggregation and the social aspects of micro-content that follow.
UPDATE (2004-09-27): see also Jon Udell's post Next-generation infoware
by : Created on Sept. 25, 2004 : Last modified Feb. 8, 2005 : (permalink)