"Sharing," for all intents and purposes, doesn't just mean how we share information and media with others, but how we retrieve information and media from others. The demo at the above link is definitely a cool concept (and I got to see some of it at Nokia World), and it really brings the idea of "sharing" closer to home.

Sharing, though, should not be confined to any specific services or technology within a device, or an online venue. Unfortunately, everyone who is out trying to make a buck wishes this could be the case. Thankfully, with technologies such as RSS, sharing was able to break the shackles of a closed infrastructure to some extent. Now, we are able to create applications that pull information from various sources and aggregate it all into a single, pretty UI. And, in turn, we are able to publish our lives in the same manner.

But, not everyone has this kind of access (or the know-how). Because of this, we are forced to use services such as Flickr, Facebook, YouTube, etc. There is a positive effect of using services, though: everyone publishes their information and media in exactly the same way (which in turn usually gets turned into an RSS feed of some sort). Back when we were just discovering the benefits of feed aggregation, the sources came in a variety of flavors and formats that we had to decipher and then parse. Thanks to additional services like Technorati and FeedBurner, some of those tasks became easier, but look... We began resorting to 3rd-party services!

So, what if there was a way to share ourselves and to accept that which is shared with us in a manner that was seamless and natural? (Go watch that video again.)

Additionally, what if we were given a "blank slate," of sorts, that was tied to the Contacts app within Maemo? In this way, each slot that we allocated for each person whom we know would somehow allow us to add the "feeds" and API services of our choice. And, what if our contacts were able to send us feed invitations, in which clicking "Accept" would add the feed to their place within our Contacts. This could be a blog feed, a video or a song to stream, a list of files to download, etc. (And, while this would work much better over broadband, the initial invitations could be sent via email, Bluetooth, SMS, or whatever additional methods were available.)

Sure, we could still use all of the existing sharing services that we are all so used to, but instead of being accessible via additional applications or the web, they would all just be fed into our Contacts' slots on our device.

Tim