Today is a good day for our first blog post. Some great things have happened lately that are too good not to share.
- First off, it seems most of us made it through the rapture
- Secondly, we’re settled into our first office in the Mission in San Francisco
- Jeremie was able to spread the word on what we are up to at GlueCon today
- We’ve added 3 awesome developers to join our team – all from the burgeoning Locker Project community; one of whom has a t-shirt collection and beard we’re excited about
- We have some good news to share, too — more on that tomorrow
It’s hard to believe we get to do this for a living. It’s this I feel is worth talking about for post #1 — why we feel so lucky and excited to be doing this. Where did Singly come from?
In 2010, each of the three of us founders (@jeremie, @smurthas and I) worked on independent applications that would pull down, save a copy of and allow you to use various types of your social data in a cross-publishing social reader / search engine. We spent, as we are seeing countless startups do today, hundreds of hours building and maintaining connectors into APIs to aggregate and synchronize various sets of personal data — each of which had their own OAuth implementation and restrictions, not to mention challenges with de-duplication and collation of common data types across the services and their idiosyncrasies. Yep. All of that work just to see if our applications would get broad market adoption, or at lease traction with awesome power users like Marshall Kirkpatrick.
Where there are inefficiencies, there are opportunities to do something good.
As an internet society, we’re moving everything to the cloud, installing more and more applications, and getting increasingly comfortable with the concept of applications that pull from multiple sets of our data. As John Battelle calls it, this is the rise of metaservices . There are profound experiences that can and will be built on top of the aggregate of all of your personal data.
Goal #1: Eliminating the first barrier of getting each person’s disparate data into one place
We envision a future where each of us have an always-on personal data locker that connects to the various services we use and ensures we have at least a copy of the information we create. We feel that the technical construction of these lockers should be done in the open.
Goal #2: Make it *super* easy for developers to build cool apps; and then to get distribution/market awareness
If you are a developer, we want you to be able to focus on building the valuable experience and flow of your product, getting to usability quickly and not worrying about all the back-end infrastructure. We are working with a handful of awesome developers who are stress testing our initial developer offering, INTEGRAL, and we can’t wait to talk more about this, soon.
Goal #3: Empower the people
The World Economic Forum has come out with a report calling personal data "the new asset class". In reality, personal data has been the oil of the internet for the last several years. It's aggregated and used by some of our most revered companies and their applications and tools, with the primary value captured through instrumented advertising, targeted content and friend suggestions – all generated outside of our visibility (often) and control (almost always).
We have been called users by websites, applications and advertisers. In the future, we will be called people.
We’re at the dawn of experiencing how powerful personalized information can be for us directly, as people. Major advancements will include instrumented interaction with social and physical space, discovery streams, personalized commerce and even powerful health experiences. The value of our personal data and what we can do with that data is going to become quickly evident as we ensure everyone has a secure, stored copy of their data on top of which awesome things can be built.
*This* is why we feel lucky and what we love. We get to work on something that we can already tangibly feel will add value to people’s lives. It’s a work “by the people” (open source), for people (moving data back to the edge of the network), to open up communication, innovation and entirely new ways of doing business.
If you share the same passions, we’d love for you to be involved/journey with us. Follow us @SinglyInc and @LockerProject. Join our mailing list: hi@singly.com I’d love to hear from you directly, too: jason@singly.com
Oh, and, we’re hiring. :)