Rudelle Blogging

The exponential growth of mashups should lead to a sharp increase of destination sites. As a result, tens of new exciting Web sites will mushroom daily in the coming years.
However, despite this major trend, let’s bear in mind that there is another wave pushing in an opposite direction.
The idea behind this new wave is as follows: to get their favourite contents, why surfers should be obliged to browse around dozens of different web sites? Wouldn't it be more efficient to get all this content directly pushed in one central place?
This is how was born the idea of personal aggregator. At the beginning, it was just about getting all your RSS feeds on a single page. But this new ecosystem quickly became much more sophisticated. Now, you can easily and freely aggregate thousands of contents from all different sources ranging from weather forecast, email notification, auction tracking, stocks alerts…
The current battle is about who will control this personal aggregator: either a central supplier (as Google and Yahoo! or even Netvibes as a challenger) or either it will be directly integrated in the web browser (Microsoft and Firefox strategy).
In this new world, the challenge for content providers changes radically. It is mo more a question of how to attract surfers on the most beautiful site of the world. Now it’s about making its content accessible on each personal aggregator. As space on this personal aggregator is inevitably limited, the battle for space between content providers will be fierce. Each inch gained on competition will be a victory!
2007 will be an exciting and key year in the field. Comparing mahsups and personal aggregator, we should see which force proves to be the more dynamic.