The value proposition of the old school Web portal was simple - we aggregate content for you to consume. In return for this service, you'll give us your attention, which we will monetize via advertisements. Companies like AOL and Yahoo executed against this value proposition and secured rather significant positions in the blossoming Web space.

The foundational assumption of the portal model was that the user is a passive consumer of content. This concept used to work well because:

• Content and service creation was expensive
• Aggregating content and services was a manual process
• Computing, storage, and bandwidth were expensive
• Web-based programming languages, methodologies, and toolkits were limited

These dynamics have changed. The proliferation of Web Services, micro-formats, and structured data formats has given birth to a new class of Web-based applications that leverage data from multiple sources. The rich interaction once only possible in desktop programming environments is now available for the Web programming environment. The base assumptions that made portals the best model simply do not apply any longer.

The new model is "media served a la carte." Video, text, audio, images, and even applications are being exposed via Web Services and widgets. People are no longer satisfied with the "go-to" content model, demanding instead a "come to me" Web. People are spending an increasing amount of time on social networks, startpages, and blogs. As the cost of content production decreases, more control of content generation is flowing to the users. If the value proposition for the portal was "We aggregate content for you to consume," the new value proposition is "We give you tools to aggregate, create, and share content easily."

The startpage is fantastic example of this new paradigm. Hosted services like Netvibes or Pageflakes enable people to assemble their own sites in minutes, using simple drag-and-drop tools to grab photos from Flickr, news from CNN, articles from Wikipedia, and much, much more. Startpages, social networks, and blogs have long been treated as separate categories of Web-based applications. However, this is changing. As these categories evolve, they are merging into a new class of application - the Social Aggregator.