GregHay.com

Spring brings sailing and that means, as a kid the family would be piled into the minivan and driven to Clayton NY to get the boat ready for the season. Actually, “piled into the minivan” is being generous, kidnapped by my father is a better way to put it. It was always, a horrible Saturday of nice weather wasted climbing around a rock parking lot moving things, untying knots, painting things and applying wax all over fiberglass. Sorry Dad, those Saturdays sucked. It was sunny and nice out, our friends would be out playing football somewhere and we would be 2 hours away, stepping over piles of dirty snow hidden in shadows, banging our heads off of stuff, freezing our hands on everything and all to put on a coat of bottom paint on Scooter or pass you tools to as you put up the stanchions.

What does complaining about having to prepping a boat have to do with Social Media? Portability. My biggest beef with how diverse my communications methods have become is that they have also become that much more complicated. Every time I change computers, devices or locations I have to restart. There’s no “Greg” I can just take everywhere and plug in when I get there. Every time I have to paint the bottom and wax the hull, I can’t just move from machine to machine with one ID that would be recognized by my browser, applications and machine.

OpenID addresses some of these issues, but that’s just at the browser/website level, when will it work at a more universal level? If I lose my phone I want it to restore to “Greg” when resynchronized with a new computer or phone, it is never seamless and always causes problems. With my dream Portability Device, an online database of personal settings and preferences would be stored for me. Then as a user I could download the apps I wanted on any machine and point all the applications and settings to “me.” Apple, Microsoft, too much to ask? Please? You’d have one customer tomorrow.

admin note: Nice pink jeans Elliot