GoingOn and Digital Life Style Aggregator

Lately I have been really busy with preparing for alpha release of the GoingOn product. I will wait a few days more to give my perspective on the product and what it takes to build a product of size of GoingOn. This is especially different from a regular product development experience because of the way in which we were refining features and that is primarily because of the way things are evolving in the Web 2.0 domain.

I will give more details later on this but I wanted to emphasize the fact that we have incorporated Marc‘s vision of DLAs (Digital Lifestyle Aggregators) in the product and this is huge. We started working with Marc around 14 months back and we have been learning more and more about DLAs from him. But this will actually be the first time that we will be seeing the concepts live in a large product. Needless to say that I am so excited about that and at the same time it puts a lot of pressure on us to do it right.

Bernard in his post ‘Web Roll-Up’ mentions the fact that we are integrating a large number of web-services in our product. He mentions del.icio.us, Flickr but there are a lot other which are into the pipeline and we will just keep adding services. It’s worth mentioning here that we could have created a lot of features ourselves rather than integrating with the existing systems but as Bernard points out (and is the vision of DLAs), our vision is to ‘aggregate’ these feature companies and provide a common platform to people to use these features. In Bernard’s words:

As I posted here before, I agree that there are too many one feature startups without a real business model and who probably pray for an acquisition as an exit strategy. In some ways GoingOn Networks can be a home for many of these “feature” companies and more developed Web 2.0 companies. While it’s not our primarily focus, nor do we want to be the “Ellis Island” of the Web 2.0 landscape (“Give me your poor, your tired, your huddled masses…”), we have incorporated Marc Canter’s vision of a DLA (Digital Lifestyle Aggregator) into our platform. People can integrate their Flickr and del.icio.us like many other platforms, but you’ll see a lot more after our beta. We do want to provide a digital hub for people’s favorite web services and we won’t discriminate, so hopefully we can develop this effectively

As I said, I am very excited about our upcoming release and I hope that we can live up to the expectations and our reputation. Stay tuned for an update on this!