Why Is It #allaboutholdenpage at Kynetx?

If you followed the Kynetx Impact Conference at all, or you followed my Twitter stream, you know that the conference was "all about me".

While I would love to think this is because I am oh so incredibly awesome and popular, the reality is, I am not that cool, nor am I that awesome (well... I do think I am pretty awesome at times :P ).The point Steve Fulling, and the rest of the Kynetx team was trying to make with #itsallaboutholdenpage is that with Kynetx's platform, the web is all about me, and in extension, all about you.

What do I mean?

Let's first look at it from a web users standpoint. The web, as we typically see it today, is controlled by the vision of huge entities such as Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon, and even Twitter. Mainstream users are *begging* for more personalization. The problem that we have with personalization is that mainstream users don't typically know how to go about personalizing the web.

Also, the dirty truth about mainstream users is that while they *want* personalization, when companies offer them just that, most users "go for the defaults" (credit: Jon Udell). Hell, even I go for the defaults out of pure laziness, and I talk about personalization on my blog all the time!

In another words, we want a contextual web, but we users simply don't want to work for it!

So how do we break this barrier?

We have to create a balance between personalization and ease of use. Right now, most personalization tools require quite a bit of manual labor. Spending ten minutes in the world personalizing your experience on one site is the equivalent of driving an hour and a half away to get McDonald's when you already have one in town, a huge waste of time and effort. It doesn't help that once you customize your experience on one site, the siloed web we live in today prevents us from transferring that personalization to other sites. Granted, Facebook is doing a good job at solving this problem with OpenGraph, but at the expense of privacy and user trust (supposedly).

The solution to this is to create a platform that allows users to opt-in to the personalization and have the contextual web experience they have always wanted with little to no work. It wasn't until this week that I truly realized that Kynetx is this platform.

Kynetx allows people such as you and me, to create a contextual web experience. All we users have to do now is click, "install" and bam! Our web is personalized and tailored to our personal needs, while still maintaining complete control. I think that is pretty cool, and I now share Jesse Stay's view that Kynetx is the future of the web.

But Kynetx is not just about us web users, Kynetx is also about the developers.

Most developers want easy ways to provide a contextual web for mainstream users while respecting their users rights. Developers also want easy ways to create, update, and distribute their apps. Kynetx is completely opt-in for the user. Creating applications using the Kynetx App Builder is a breeze (granted, I only made a hello world app). Want to distribute your application via bookmarklet, extension, or identity card? Kynetx automatically does that for you once you are done creating your application. Want to sell your application? Feel free to in the Kynetx Marketplace.

But here is where it gets interesting for developers and users alike.

Once a user installs a Kynetx application, developers can update their applications without requiring manual updates on the users end. Basically, Kynetx applications work like web applications, but are based on the client. After talking to many developers at the conference, this is a god send in their eyes.

So there you have it. This is what Steve Fulling meant by #itsallaboutholdenpage. It simply means that anyone can shape the web to their liking using Kynetx, and developers can make these applications in ways that are convenient, simple, and respectful to users as well.

So, if you ever see the hashtag #itsallaboutholdenpage, replace my name with yours. I want you to do this, because with Kynetx, and the contextual web, it's not about me, Facebook, Google, or Twitter.

#itsallaboutyou.