RSS
An answer.
David at Marketing Begins At Home answers Robert's question:
I want the devices I own now to still work with the files and filesystems of five, ten, even twenty years from now. I know people listening to the radio on 50 year old boat anchors, I dont see why that principle shouldnt apply to consumer technology.I agree with everything here with the exception of devices working with filesystems twenty years from now. We live in a world where technology changes too fast for that. I've got stuff backed up on tapes for which there are not readers. I just want the storage mechanism to act the same way so I don't have to relearn things.I dont want DRM - I bought the file, I own it and if I want to burn a CD for my wife, thats my business.
I want Word files that I created on my PowerBook to work on a Windows machine - guess what, every now and then it doesnt.
I want simple tools to put every picture and video I make of my kids in my parents and in-laws hands within minutes. I dont want to have to worry if the file is in .mov or .avi or whatever format - I just want it up there and done with.
Just like you said, I want to put EVERYTHING on the Internet but I want an easy, painless way - a way that I could explain to my mother in a phone call - to do it. APIs and OPML files are fine for us geek folks to talk about but in the end, the folks out there dont need to know what they are, they just need to know what they can do with them.
Blogging, podcasting, and vblogging aren't fads. People have things they want to say, and they will do so in the way they feel most comfortable, either through the written or spoken word, or through images both still and moving. Life should be as simple as "Save to website", or drag and drop.
I don't want to worry about filetypes either. I tried to watch the Nortel AGM today and found out that though I have several media players on my PC, I didn't have the one I needed so I had to install it.
But I also want flexible interoperability. If OPML and RSS achieve that, then that's great, though the average person probably doesn't care. I just don't want to be locked into one tool in case something better comes along.
I'd like flexible interfaces to my data. Perhaps text-based like a search engine. Or perhaps geospatially, like Google Earth or BlogMap.
It would be ideal if the products were platform independant too, but that really isn't as critical.
But I absolutely refuse to pay over and over for the same product while the vendor works the bugs out. Been there. Done that.