I have been interested in the concept of digital lifestyle aggregation (DLA) for some time.

My most recent pain surrounding this had to do with the launch of a web site promoting our condo in Rosemary Beach, Florida. In conjunction with this we also listed the condo on a few of the online rental web sites (boy are they getting a little long in the tooth). Regardless, the Kokomo Kid exclaimed at one point, “you mean every time I make a change on one site, I need to go and replicate it on the others?” “Ummm, yeah” I replied. A microcosm of a larger problem that has yet to be addressed.

Well, Fred Wilson pointed me to an post by Peter Rip. The interesting part is here:

Much of the “easy” innovation seems to have been wrung out of the Web 2.0 wave. Web 2.0 was cheap – thanks to open source, simple – thanks to RSS/REST, and distinctive – thanks to AJAX and Flash. It helped more than a little the Google has continued to entice us all with the abundant profits in Internet advertising.

Now the hard work begins, again. The next wave of innovation isn’t going to be as easy. The hard problems in the WWW are no longer usability or ease of everyday content creation. These problems are solved. Digital cameras, SixApart, WordPress, and digital video cameras showed us how ease it could be. Now the hard part is moving from Web-as-Digital-Printing-Press to true Web-as-Platform. To make the Web a platform there has to a level of of content and services interoperability that really doesn’t exist today.

The Web today still resembles MS-DOS more than MS-Windows. Every website is an island, an island that knows nothing about any other website. This is no different than the world before the Windows Clipboard. All 640KB of memory was available to whatever application was running. The point of integration was the User. As it is today.

The Kid was incredulous because she is the human integrator. Removing her from this task and enabling web software do the integration is one of the next waves of Internet innovations.