My digital life started a long time ago with a small website of a server of the University. Afterwards the website moved to xs4all. Later it moved to the Digital City Leiden. Followed by Geocities and finally to my own domain ajebe.com. The last few years my site has been located on leiden365.nl.

First the sites were just static HTML. Afterwards PHPnuke, and afterwards WordPress for my blog and Gallery for the pictures. Now I just use WordPress and am looking into a combination of WordPress and Drupal for the future.

This is my current situation. My own blog, and various profile pages and publications, messages, software, pictures, movies, etc. all over the place. A lot of things have their own little spot and are located in a specialized part of the internet. To me it seems logical.

Information should be available everywhere but right now the fragmentation this causes makes it very difficult to get a clear over all picture. I want integration! There are a lot of tools online that don’t integrate at all. The problem is that everyone wants to keep the things they have and the things they get. The same with information. Once I type something somewhere this becomes an asset for the company where I wrote it. Sharing this information makes it loose some of it’s uniqueness and consequently some of it’s value. When you loose value as a company this will probably translate into loosing advertisement dollars.

There are a lot of different places on the web to leave content of value behind. Facebook, Hyves, Google+, Twitter, LinkedIn, Drupal, Reader, Gmail, etc. All these sites have little integration and they all strive to keep the consumers on their sites. It is not uncommon to have similar discussions going on on different sites that are not technically related. This sometimes requires people to create (write down) the same content (or opinion) on different places.

The new social web 2.0 is a nice step upwards from the old information web but the next web needs to change to survive. It is weird but everyday I visit the same list of websites to keep up to date. Sometimes I add or remove a website, but the new web foremost needs to integrate services. The social web needs be really get a single face. We need to take away the need to post the same opinion over and over. We need to take away the confusion about where the most recent discussion is taking place and who are leading the discussion. The new Google+ is exactly the same as all the stuff we already have. We are still at 2.0 and we’re not moving forward.

I don’t want to visit the same list of sites every day to see partly the same information spread all over the place. All this searching and checking is a tremendous waste of effort. I want a single way to find information and find all related information at the same time.

I don’t want my software, pictures, opinions, messages all in different sites with all of then their own counters and comments. I just want all in one!