Aggregating it all

As a web consumer I use many different web based services for equally many purposes. Bloglines is my preferred feed reader, I use wordpress for blogging, del.icio.us for bookmarking, google for finding stuff and places, technorati for tracking links to my blog, etc, etc. Many of these have several alternatives, many of which as good or even better than the ones I’m using. And even though some services have been able to innovate at a quicker pace than the services I’m using, I’m usually too lazy to make a change completely to a new service as this usually involves some amount of trouble, learning, etc. (switching costs).

Now, all of these services pretty much follow the “web 2.0″ mantra, exposing their functionalities though API’s. We’ve seen a lot of so called mash-ups that typically combine functionalities of two services in order to create a new, aggregated, service that adds value to its audience (there are, for example, many services that use the google maps API to add data to the maps). This opens up a quite interesting opportunity that I’ve been thinking about, i.e. creating a service aggregator, which would provide the user a unified experience across services and devices.

The service I’m envisioning here would provide access to search, blogging, feeds, bookmarks, image libraries, maps, calendars, contacts etc. so that the user could choose between different service providers for any individual functionality and provide that as an packed and polished end-to-end service. Instead of forcing the user to e.g. use bloglines for feeds, he/she could choose newsgator or some other supported provider (the same would apply to any type of service). The strength of the aggregated service would lie in its user-interface, of course built from the ground to cater to all kinds of devices and browsers, and would range from a full-blown AJAX implementation to a limited WAP interface, depending on the device/browser that is accessing it. It would allow for mixing of services where it makes sense, and all in all provide a much stronger experience for using everyday tools and services.

Some bigger Internet brands do this kind of aggregation of services, but they are often limited to services provided by that specific brand, not competing services. I’m a strong believer of reducing lock-in, so a useful thing to provide could be migration of data between services (how many of you have changed blogging software? It’s not fun). One-click migration between services could be great thing, no?

Another problem that such a service could address is the current API incompatibility mess. As current services in some specific domain (e.g. search) all provide different API’s for pretty much the same functionality, a services aggregator could provide unified API’s for the services it is providing, so that calls are translated on the fly and executed where appropriate. This would allow for enormous flexibility e.g. in cases where some software or service strictly requires a certain type of API, but your current tool doesn’t provide that (I can think of several examples e.g. in blogging). This would also lower entry-barriers for new services.

The reason why I’ve been thinking about this is the problem I have with most of modern web services, i.e total lack of support for accessing them through mobile phones (low-resolutions devices with limited bandwidth where AJAX certainly isn’t an option). Mobile browsing will dominate the web in a few years, so this is a very, very important area. Things I’ve talked about before, like content transcoding, could be implemented very effectively in a service like this (as the problem domain is quite specific per service type, and not too general when compared to the overall web). Providing mobile optimized API’s for different types of services would allow for easier creating of mobile front-ends and mash-ups, a thing that certainly isn’t always easy.

The obvious problem with a services aggregator is its business model. Most API’s provided today are provided for free only for non-commercial use, even prohibiting use in ad revenue driven services. And doing this for the greater good isn’t enough, as the cost of running something like this would not be cheap. Ideas?