On the whiteboard in my office I have a list of obstacles for a site I’m working on (and really the net today). My list is really long, well, actually it only has one element in it, fragmentation.

I define the issue of fragmentation as following:

fragmentation is the byproduct of a distributed democratic work environment and/or systems that try to reduce complexity through modularism. While it seems like separation of concerns makes sense to solve individual unrelated issues, it turns out that issues are more related than we originally thought.

Every time we say, the easiest way for us to do such and such is to do something new, we are most of the time incidentally adding to the issue at hand.

If we can solve this problem the world will suddenly feel more natural. Aggregation (allowing you to piece together relevant pieces of your life) is a partial solution, but it only partially fixes the problem because it depends too much on the user’s intelligence and ability to arrange their own life. We need to be more of an integrator and a relater to solve this ultra-pertinent issue.