Bijan Sabet

Do we want multi-user profiles on our devices?

This morning, I read on GigaOm about a hack that brings multi-user profiles to the iPad. It requires you to jailbreak your iPad to make this happen.

I’ve been wanting this for a long time. We have multiple floating iPads in our house. It would be great to just pick up any one and have it all set up for each person in our family.

As other CE devices have gotten social and smarter, the need for multi-user is even more important.

Take our beloved Sonos for example.

I now have Twitter and Spotify connected to our Sonos system. It’s very cool.

But our entire family uses Sonos - not just me. So any songs that are starred in Spotify on Sonos will show up in my profile. And if someone wants to tweet a song, that will come from my @bijan account. So if you happen to see a “listening to Rihanna” tweet from my account, just know that it wasn’t me ! :)

As more and more of our devices are able to tweet and offer personalization, we need some sort of way to do multi-user profiles. Sounds straightforward enough but the challenge will be making it beautiful, fast and simple.