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24 Dec 2004
Possessions Management
With the introduction of Delicious Library, I am having a second look at application that allow you to manage your possessions. These applications mainly help to manage your books, CD, DVD, Wine bottle or game collections. I think I see here a more general type of applications, which allow you to manage, register anything you have bought. These applications are most useful for books and CD’s and the-like, as you have more of them. People seem to like to register what they bought, where, rate it, comment on it, to whom the lend it and how much it cost them. Usually it was a big hassle to enter all the info, but now you can enter (or scan) the UPC-code and all relevant info will be downloaded from the Internet. A look at the various applications available reveals that there are already a lot of them out there.
From a MicroContent point of view these applications are more like Annotation tools. The user only enters the fact that he has the item, a rating and maybe some other information. Most of the content comes however from external sources, whether it has been downloaded from the Internet or copied from the product. It is unfortunate that a user has to copy this information. It should be available from the producers of these products. But they seem to be very negligent in providing this info in electronic format. And it might help them to find out who bought it! Might be a great relationship tool for them. And also the existing sources, such as Amazon, IMDB, and others are only helping partly.
What one would like to have is a ProductWiki with all information one would like to have on a product independent of any producing or selling party (not my idea by the way). Now all sources seem to be lacking the information a user wants. And if a user enters the information in his client anyway, why not publish it on a central repository as well. It would take some time to grow, but in the end the users united should be able to create something much larger than any other source.
And a client should be able to mix and match all the available information. A user should be able to indicate what information he wants to take form which source. Some sources are better than others. Not all sources have all information, so there must be some integration of sources somewhere. I guess this will take a while before this happens.