A place for my stuff
: I want a place on the Internet where I can store all my stuff so I can get to it from anywhere on any device to consume, modify, store, or share. This stuff could be anything — my movies, music, to-do lists, shopping lists (for the family to update), contacts, documents, search history, bookmarks, photos, preferences, voicemail, anything, everything. And it should come with the functionality necessary to execute all those verbs I listed (e.g., a nice little list-making ap).
I want the ultimate — in the words of George Carlin — place for my stuff.
Count on this: It will be a big consumer business. I said below, in the middle of another post, that this could come from phone or cable companies, from Google or Microsoft or Yahoo, or from a new company (VCs: pay attention!). A server for everyone and everyone on a server.
I’m writing this again to highlight it because I see lots of people dancing around this need and desire. See Jason Kottke’s smart post about his three wishes for TiVo, inspired by their move into Internet-delivered programming. I agree with two of his wants: He wants TiVo to make better, smarter, categorized recommendations. And he wants TiVo to create community around TV since it is, after all, a social experience.
But I disagree with his third wish: That TiVo becomes the Internet-accessible place for your stuff, complete with that list application. I wonder whether that’s not better up in the cloud because (1) you can get to it from anywhere — even multiple TVs, (2) the storage can be unlimited — see GMail, and (3) it won’t go obsolete. But I agree that I want it, too. Is technology like Christmas: If I hint enough, I’ll get it?
: I once worked with a German company called Twest.de that was going to deliver the shopping-list ap and other great little bits that treated the Internet like a life’s operating system. Wrong time, wrong platform, wrong VCs, too bad. But now the time has come.
