Innovative Uses of Portable Content: A New Category of Products and Services?

I realized recently that several of my favorite things on the web have something in common. They're taking content that lives elsewhere and not just mashing it up, but transforming it into something new. I've started to think this approach might be part of the next generation of social media services--tools that take advantage of data portability in new ways.

We talk about data portability all the time in terms of newly-enabled distribution, and beyond a doubt, distribution is a huge benefit of widgets, APIs, standards, and syndication. But there's also a new opportunity to innovate, beyond viralizing, mashing up, or recontextualizing content. Some of my favorite tools go another step further, transforming the content itself. Let me explain.

Flickr, as regular readers of this blog are (all too?) aware, is my very most favorite web site. And Flickr's combination of public APIs and open-source projects has spawned a huge number of tools and services, like Flickr Graph, Shozu, and Mappr, that recontextualize photos from Flickr in all sorts of interesting ways. The problem with these services, from a business perspective, is the lack of a revenue model.

Printing digital photos, on the other hand, is a no-brainer. It was a big part of the revenue model for the earliest photo sharing sites, including KodakGallery and others, and it's a nice business. The problem with it is the lack of differentiation among the many competitors in that space. You have to either compete on price, build a reputation for superior quality, or retain exclusive access to the content itself.

A couple standout services go farther.

Moo basically just prints out your photos, like the all the similar services--but the difference is that they enable you to create distinctively-shaped business cards from your photos. And the shape of the card is really the thing that works. They're smaller than a standard business card, and proportionally longer. So they stand out, and in an interesting way, they're informal. Moo has really put forward a new version of a throwback product--the personal calling card. Moo transforms the personal digital assets hosted on Flickr into personalized, real-world artifacts--a new use for a thing you already have.

Animoto is a little different, in that its product stays on the digital side of the digital / analog frontier, but like Moo, they have taken advantage of an existing asset by transforming it into something else.

Using Animoto's web application, you can import your photos from any of a number of media hosts (including Flickr) and turn them into a movie. Animoto's user experience really stands out. The whole process is, dare I say it, simple. You import your pictures, arrange them, select or upload music, click a button, and a few minutes later Animoto spits out a polished, fun, unique movie you can import into all the social media contexts you'd expect.

Here's an Animoto video I threw together just for fun, starring a few of my colleagues. Took about 5 minutes to make.

Cool! Ok, maybe you had to be there. But what I love about Animoto is that it takes your photos and increases their entertainment and storytelling value--increasing the usefulness of your things.

There are many other examples of products and services that take advantage of portable content, and I think they represent an emerging category--and an emerging opportunity to create new kinds of value.