Nowadays, people are increasingly using a wide variety of web services. Take these examples:
- For sharing photos: Flickr, Picasa, SmugMug
- For watching videos: YouTube, Vimeo, MetaCafe, Google Video
- For sharing bookmarks: Del.icio.us, Digg, StumbleUpon, Reddit, Magnolia
- For posting articles (i.e., for blogging): Blogger, WordPress, Tumblr
- For building profiles and social networking: Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, Orkut
- For writing short quotes or updating their status: Twitter, Google Talk, Pownce, Jaiku
- For reading news (feeds): Google Reader, Netvibes
- For listening to music, radios or podcasts: Last.fm, iLike, Pandora, Mog, iTunes
- For buying books, movies, etc.: Amazon, Netflix, Flixster
However, an important issue that has never been fully solved is that all this information remains scattered on different sites. It seems that one must get an account everywhere in order to be someone on the web. As a result, web users nowadays are subject to the "Multiple Profile Disorder" (or "User 2.0 pathology"). The idea behind this concept is that the so-called web 2.0 is still a network with several sites (and very interesting indeed!), but yet, to know the people that make this web you must follow every aspect of his or her identity on each of the services he or she uses. In other words, the web 2.0 is not successful in allowing people to meet the user behind the username.
Popego is a web service aggregator that gives the user the ability to gather the information of his or her web accounts in a single place so as to express his or her identity on the web and build a reputation based on interests.
It has been said that we are experiencing the transition to the "semantic web", i.e., a network with a more thorough understanding of the meaning of the information it handles. As a matter of fact, with the growth of web services, there is an enourmous amount of information about different assets (photos, videos, bookmarks, music, movies, etc.). Very useful information can be inferred from its tags, for example. Or from the way in which these items are related, such as being shared by users that may share the same interests as well.
I like to think of Yahoo! and Google as one of the first web companies that took full advantage of this. They made the first step towards a semantic web by providing a set of (ranked) links associated with any keyword the user enters.
But I believe we are also experiencing a transition to a web where users play a key role like never before. After all, Internet is made of people, not computers.

