I have identified the next innovation frontier! Multiple device presence synchronization.

Every innovation is born out of a tangle of issues that represent a problem. For this particular point, my problem is a maddening one. I have several streams of information that I regularly check on:

1. Twitter
2. Facebook
3. Google Reader/RSS Aggregator
4. FourSquare
5. GetGlue
6. Email

I use different access devices during my day depending on the setting and activity level present in that environment. I use my iMac while I’m active at work, I use my iPhone and iPad mixed when I’m traveling as a passenger. I use my iPhone while waiting for long durations in queues and I’ll eat private meals with either my iPhone or iPad running. My problem is one of annoyance and the possibility that I’ve missed information. When I move forward in any of these information streams on one device it can be a challenge to update all the other devices with “my bookmark” in each stream. If I’m catching up on tweets on my iPhone and I get to work, I want to switch my attention away from my iPhone and towards my iMac. What I want is for my last seen tweet to be updated on each device when I start it’s attendant application. The same goes for my Google Reader RSS Aggregator. I read news items while riding the bus from home to work and when I arrive at work I want to pick up on my iMac where I left off on my iPhone.

There are several applications that I use that have ways to address my needs, but they aren’t wholly reliable. Twitter has a “favorite” system that could be used for this, but that’s expecting one bit of the system (a square peg) to be pounded into shape to work as a solution for something else (a round hole). And Google Reader has a built-in capacity to do some of what I wish, but nobody has written the code to facilitate that requirement yet.

How could something like this best work? As with many other things the answer I believe lies in abstraction. The most convenient form of abstraction would be to have every client I use understand how to interface with Dropbox. Each app can connect to Dropbox and in the root folder of my Dropbox it can use file time and date stamps to determine when the latest updates were sent to my Dropbox, and the files themselves contain the positional information that I need to share between many systems. When I read tweets, the latest tweet that I’ve seen has its date stamp put in a file and sent to Dropbox. When I’m browsing Google Reader articles, the last-seen-article has it’s date stamp put in a file and sent to Dropbox. So on and so forth. Everything is transparent, the files are easily accessible from Dropbox and because the network is ubiquitous, I have no problems accessing Dropbox from wherever I am. Even if I didn’t have the network all the time, the syncing and updating functions of Dropbox would eventually guarantee that my position updates are always up in the cloud.

With this solution I could start reading tweets on one device, put it to sleep and continue reading on another device. I think this will become more and more relevant as time goes on and people start using multiple devices, computers, tablets, and handhelds. The only real challenge is encouraging every app vendor and system writer to hop on board with this idea.