Ok, I flipped the switch, and onXiam is now live! My little brainchild is all grown up.
In honor of this moment, I thought that I would try to elaborate further on this burning question:
Why did I make onXiam? Well, for starters, you could read the
about page and learn how my mom helped to inspire it, but I'll try to expand a little bit on that story now.
I work in technology. I deal with technology everyday. To me, it's second nature to sign up for new online communities, give them a try and then either continue using them or stop. But I got to thinking -- how normal is this for the "average joe or jane"? I've had some non-techie friends who just don't do this. They are not at the leading edge of discovering and testing new web communities, but once these communities catch on (ala
flickr), then this group of people is more than happy to sign up and use the service.
But how do you know who is using any of these services? Well, many of them will let you browse or search for a user on their site, but how do you know that "johnny4EVAR" on Slashdot is the same as "j4E-fragman" on
360Voice and he's also "babemagnet" over on
MySpace?
When I was at
ETech06, a strange thing happened to a friend of mine. A man approached him in the hall and said "Hello. I bought your CD." What does that mean? Check this out. My friend Trapper spends some of his free time making electronic music. He posts it in an area of
his website. Apparantly what happened was this man had randomly seen one of Trapper's photos come through Flickr. He ended up clicking through to Trapper's website, found his music page and ordered a CD. Then strangely enough they ran into each other at ETech06.
What a random occurrance! But what if there were a place where you could explicitly do something like this? What if you could find a photo that you like on Flickr and then easily search to see what other online presences that photographer had? Hey, he is a writer! Hey, he composes music! Or hey, this girl plays
World of Warcraft and
Animal Crossing! And, she even hangs out in
Second Life! That is where onXiam comes in.
Another thing that had lingered with me for some time now is the title of a presentation that
Tom Coates gave at ETech06. The title was "Native to a Web of Data". I really like that title -- and I quite enjoyed the presentation as well Tom if you happen to see this via Technorati or something. I think that title conveys in a very succinct manner the state of the web today. Data is everywhere, and we are becoming quite used to that.
However, another term that has been tossed about for quite some time now is the idea of "everything addressable". Products have SKU numbers, books have ISBN numbers, but what do people have? Let me clarify, what do
online personas have? FoxyGirl on
Friendster could be an entirely different person than FoxyGirl on
YouTube.
I'm not going to use my social security number as my online ID anywhere. I try to use the same name whenever I sign up for an online service or community, but sometimes that ID is already taken and it's just not possible. With so many communities popping up online these days, how can you manage it? And beyond managing it, how can you broadcast your presence to others? And how can you find other people you know if you don't know whether or not they are active in a particular online community?
These are all things that went through my head when I started building onXiam. I thought about services like
Sxip and wondered if what I was thinking about doing was too similar to their offering, but then I thought "no, it's really not". I did not build onXiam to be an iron-clad identity manager. If you want to sign up and say "On Hotmail I am BillGates" you can do that, but to what end? What benefit could you hope to get by doing such a thing?
OnXiam exists to help people make connections. It is a network that is built on top of networks. Give it a try. Tell your friends. I'm quite curious to see what comes of it.
And feel free to drop me a comment here. I'd love to hear some feedback.
-Kevin
