It has never been my object to record my dreams, just to realize them.
- Man Ray
Over the past several weeks, Singly has begun to take shape. Since we’ve been heads down working on product development, I’d like to share some of what we’ve accomplished recently.
Continuing to build on the Locker Project code base, we’ve developed the open source platform to the point where we can demonstrate an exciting range of functionality. It’s capable of syncing, archiving and indexing pictures, tweets, links and social connections across six different services, and provides a unified API to access all of the collected data.
As proof of concept, so far we’ve used it to create:
These basic tools nicely demonstrate the breadth of capabilities available in the platform today. We’ve also built out all of the trimmings, like making it easy to sign up and connect to all of your accounts.
Next, we’re working on opening up the platform for developers to build their own applications. Armed with JavaScript and HTML, you’ll be able to create sophisticated tools, powered by personal data, without the hassle of building a data management backend. If you’re interested, drop us a line with your email address, and we’ll put you on the list for early invitations.
We’ve been busy over the past few months. We’ve grown, hit our stride as a team, and have hit a major product milestone we’re thrilled about. We’re also fast approaching the Web 2.0 Summit, where Jeremie is outlining a vision for the next 10 years of personal computing.
As we consider this future, we’re mindful of the industry’s past – especially its advancements due to the indelible will and art of Steve Jobs.
He went “upstream, against the currents of social, economic and technological norms, all in pursuit of an unshakable vision” (Pogue, NYT), with a zeal best captured by Apple’s “Think Different” campaign:
Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in square holes – the ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules and they have no respect for the status quo….the only thing that you can’t do is ignore them. Because they change things.
Jobs loved to say he lived at the intersection of technology and liberal arts – he saw things from a unique perspective. His art changed things – how we share, create, connect, experience, and grow. Simply put – he was a Giant.
In the coming days, we’re going to share more of our culture, creations and the ways in which we, too, aspire to change things. We want to humbly recognize that we do it “standing on the shoulders of giants” — not just those of this one Giant, but also those of the entire free open source software movement and community to which even Apple owes a great deal of its success, and to which this phrase is often applied.
And, in light of this Giant’s passing, let’s (as a community, team, advisors and investors) reaffirm not just how we see the future, but how we pursue it. To borrow Jobs’ words, let’s stay hungry and foolish; ignore dogma and embrace intuition; love the art of what we do; and remember through our journey together that the dots are always connected.
Here’s to troublemakers; to giants; and to those who get to stand on their shoulders.
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, Simon 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 least 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 helping us think through our initial developer offering 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. I’d love to hear from you directly, too: jason@singly.com
Oh, and, we’re hiring. :)
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