Barb Dybwad recently wrote a blog entry entitled
Can
I subscribe to your brain? about the “
idea of being able to subscribe (ideally in one click or simple set of
steps) to a feed that contains a person’s total output [snip] My reaction is
three-fold: 1) Yes, I want to subscribe to people’s brains, please. 2) Yes, I
want to provide my own “RSS brain” – one feed to rule them all. 3) This sounds
an awful lot like a [Digital Lifestyle Aggregator].”
Guess what? It exists. It is called Multiply. You want to subscribe to all my output in
“
one click”. You want to be able to see my blog, my photos, my video, stuff I’m
selling, my restaurant reviews in “
one click”. Here you go…
http://michaelg.multiply.com
(Yes, you can get all that’s there in RSS too, or e-mail
alerts if you want.)
You may argue that the above isn’t all my digital output. I may have
stuff elsewhere. But this is all the stuff I want you to see. That’s a
choice on the part of the producer, the content owner. Wishing there
were an easy way to aggregate a person’s content against that person’s wishes
is
irrational. It is akin to saying you wish you could see all the content
that I have posted on Multiply for my family, despite not being
considered family
by me.
You may also argue that for Multiply to be a Digital Lifestyle
Aggregator it requires the person to put all their content on Multiply.
Bingo.
You need to look at the aggregator concept from both sides…not just the
consumer side, but the producer side as well. In one of our user’s
words:
I could blog
on LiveJournal or MySpace, try to sell the Mac any number of places, post
reviews on Epinions, and put my calendar on .Mac. I don't like having to log
into a separate site for every single thing I want to do. It's much easier to
have things in one place, and of the "one stop" sites out there,
Multiply is the best implemented and least prone to having problems.
Why would any individual want to post photos on one site,
blog on another, share video on a third, and so on, and so on, and maintain a
dozen user ids and passwords, and learn a dozen different interfaces provided
there was a solution that allowed them to do them all effectively in one
place?
Marc Canter writes in
Mixing
and Matching on one’s public page that “
This is what we all need - every DLA, portal, social network and
blogging tool around. The ultimate "About Me" page. Now that Tribe
has set the new standard, all other systems will be compared to this.”
Tribe maybe has set the standard for importing content from
other places. But who is that targeting? Certainly not the mainstream audience
that wants things simple and convenient.
Multiply is not just the only site that allows you to
easily
share video, music, photos, and blog in one place, but it’s the only site that
integrates sharing with your social network so all the content gets looked at
and discussed.
By putting all the content in one place it encourages people
to explore new media. An active photo sharer that has never blogged (and has no
real interest in it) is not going to sign-up for a blogging site. Yet, they
start blogging on Multiply. Individuals
that didn’t even know their digital cameras could take video, started uploading
video when we introduced the feature since there was zero barrier to entry (no
new password, no new web site to learn) for uploading video.
Are there photo sharing sites that have some minor features
Multiply doesn't have? Sure.
Are there blogging sites that have some minor features Multiply doesn't have?
Sure.
Does Multiply provide enough features for most people to
easily “
subscribe to people’s brains” and to easily provide
your own feed to
“
rule them all?" Absolutely. That, I believe, makes Multiply the
standard.
