Digital Lifestyle Aggregators (DLAs)

Dig into the world of DLAs and the road leads to Marc Canter. A DLA is one of those things you wouldn't want to try to explain to your mom but if your profession has you anywhere near creating specifications for next generation applications, you'd better get in this game. Here are some DLA characteristics as described by Marc (which I first found via Om's synopsis on the same topic):

- integrated environment - bringing together lots of things in one place

- aggregated information - from all over the place

- highly customizable - which modules, what look and feel and what UI

- all supporting open standards to create an inter-connected meshed web

You can see the obvious relationship between these attributes and how people like Joseph Smarr and Google are describing OpenSocial, (which is a related title wave that will also hit in 2008). The opening up of applications and communities is inevitable and it will quickly become standard practice. The notion of losing access to core information as I move from one community to another or one app to another is antiquated. There is core information and connections that I never want to be detached from. In fact, I want my applications to be "intelligently" linked from the activity I'm doing and the community I'm doing it with or for. I don't only want access to information across communities and activities, I want dynamic interaction that contributes in real time to my understanding of a topic and advances the quality of my interaction with the community I'm involved with. Plaxo Pulse is making a run at this, but it's still in it's infancy.Walls between applications and communities are simply artifacts, probably of a shrink-wrap software mentality or business models that need to "own eyeballs".

All this goes hand-in hand with Doc Searl's presentation at this years Le Web in Paris , where he says on Slide 16 " Herding people into walled gardens and guessing about what makes them social will seem as absurd as it actually is"

At Ribbit, being rooted in telephony, we are awake to the losing proposition of "walled-gardens" because we are convinced that this will be the demise of traditional phone companies. Ironically, it could also be the downfall of traditional software and web application companies if they don't quickly embrace the concept of the living web.