Having kids means understanding convergence. Every day you watch as baby and adult inside of your kids vie for control. I'm a baby. No, I'm a grown up. I'm a two year old, no I'm 22. In the center of that boxing ring is who they are at any given moment.
So Jenna's standing at the foot of the bed, reading aloud from her holiday wish list, which she has painstakingly and independently compiled on notebook paper from devout study across three toy catalogs that came by mail.
She's serious about the performance. She recites an entire page of descriptions, prices, and if you ask, she'll sing you the jingle.
Her wishlist got me thinking about what I want. Not just in an amazon.com sort of way, but my macro wish list.
My wishes that are horses with beggars who ride.
And that got me thinking about how we seem to be just one good utilitool shy of having the ability to create our own world wide wishlists.
Break me out of Amazon and Froogle, of ebay and overstock. Let me cross from retail into give-space and back. Let my wishes reflect my dimensions. And know me all the while.
Let me add a donation to MSF from over here, and Golden Pearl Shower Cream from over there, but only while it's on clearance, because if you're going to spend $17, then I'd rather have two of these, because I get the free pink mini dog. I want my wishlist to know that. My wish is that meals on wheels in can keep bringing lunches to my Aunt, and that our Ford gets paid off before they want it back. I'd like some heat for the winter and a health insurance premium or two for when Jenna gets strep. Add in a bottle of Children's Motrin for that. And refill her prescription Singulair at Walgreens if you would. I want a real tire on my car, not a donut, and Tires Plus by my house gives us a discount for having our work done there, so add Two Installed Tires to my wishlist. Let me know when it's time to rotate them. And I could use a copy of photoshop -- that would rock my world. On my world wide wish list you could pay my garbage or buy me a can. And if you could send a paid roofer my way, well you'd blow me down. You could add to my wish list some supplies for Shelley's photography and books for Locke, shipped to their doors, in my stead, because I need them to do what they do, to put a different kind of roof over my head.
You and I are not so different, and very different, at any one time, in need of this as much as this.
I want commerce to become elastic.
intuitively inclusive. an extranet of wants and needs.
let me be buyer, seller and intermediary all at once.
Me the marketer, Me the market, Me the marketplace.
Can you give me that?
And for a little extra, can you wrap it up with an RSS bow?
Happy Holidays...
