The Central Server

On Buzz Machine Jeff Jarvis talks about a mythical central server that holds all our information of every type (and he does it while referencing George Carlin, always a plus.) I have the same kind of desires that he mentions, that my information is available to whatever device I might be on. I got a little of this from .Mac when I created an account to sync my address book and calendar from the old desktop and get them on the new laptop. I’d like all the things he mentions available, plus a few others.

I want my RSS information there, my subscribed feeds and the state of my subscription – what I have read, marked for later, removed, etc. (This is actually what Shrook does for me right now that I like so much.) Add to that my NNTP subscription states, my IM buddy lists. But I want more.

Even better if it would include metadata about my radio and TV preferences, such as TiVo information and my RadioLover information and things like that. You don’t need to store the actual media files for each, but information about people – what people want to follow, what they have seen, etc. Think metadata about your media, movies, songs and what you have seen and what you thought of them. Then, somewhere you could have a service that takes this metadata and serves out the media files, adds them to your Netflix queue or whatever. Imagine that, whatever device you are on – laptop, desktop or handheld – you can see the list of media you want to watch or listen to and make a request to see them on this. It requires thinking a different way, rather than a device-centric view it is it a person-centric view.

A lot of this stuff exists here and there. It would be quite cool to have a unified server that does all this. What an infotopia!