In the real world, you become closer to the products you own as they go through the wear and tear of everyday life. I'll never forget the day I got my drumset as a kid. We went to Guitar Center and returned with a shiny instrument. Its "new" polish made it that much more special, but over time its scratches, dents, and blemishes made it feel like mine, and made it sound better. The same was true with my high school car. Its imperfections, and the stories that came along with them, made it endearing.

As Nick Dangerfield (ToBe.Us and Playbutton) pointed out the other day, there isn't a digital equivalent of this dynamic. Internet products don't feel more like ours as we use them. Sure, feeds are "personalized" but it's not the same. Is it?

The person responsible for the wear and tear of your drum set is its owner, and the person responsible for the wear and tear of your content on the web, is, well its owner, which is often not the person who made the content.

So in some sense there is a ton of wear and tear on the web, but the tearing isn't from the people who are using, it's from the people who own the text box.

There's a tipping point with products where they move from platonic to personal, a moment in time where a precious iPhone in it's protective case (like the plastic on new car seats) becomes yours; where you don't mind about the scratches, put a sticker on the back etc.

Some products improve with age better than others. I used to own an old Landrover and unlike almost every other car, it looked better with more dents and scratches because it was utilitarian.

In tech, there's an opportunity to compete with Apple's jewel like hardware with rugged utilitarian design. For software it means personalization, but at the level of developers (custom themes, plugins) not end users. i.e. Wordpress not Myspace.

Good point about custom themes, David. AVC.com definitely feels like Fred Wilson's blog, to me, as an outsider. Though I wonder if Fred feels like it has grown with him over time, or if the theme feels as shiny, new and unchanged as when he first installed it?

There is a sequence that helps me understand the differences between the tangible and intangible.

First is the understanding of the product. Understanding the conditions that influence a certain behaviour, the way such conditions can be influenced by you, the reasons behind (most of) it. This understanding is something that, at the necessary levels, only developers have. A huge shortcoming for us non-developers.

This understanding takes you to the second notion: knowing that a product is imperfect, frail and vulnerable - that's when a more intimate connection with the product can occur. That's when care also arises. The feeling of repairing your drumset or your Landrover is a memorable one, one that unites (test here is replaceability of the product). And that modification or repair takes you to the trajectory of the product. Maybe it's to be found in open source development, but, again, my ignorance does not allow me to understand this well.

All this takes an entire different and very interesting angle if we talk about personal digital objects like images and sounds.

Woah, Nick, well said. The replaceability test is an interesting one, indeed (thinking about how quickly I ditched MySpace for Facebook).

The exceptions that I'd call out are more on the developer side, and increasingly archaic, to boot: sitting down in front of someone else's bash prompt or version of emacs is a window into that person's mind.

It's not quite parallel to the drumkit example -- these aren't nicks and scratches with their own history -- but it is an example of a digital product becoming more "yours" over time. Typing "note" into a terminal on one of my machines does something that doesn't happen on anyone else's machine.

But those examples are relatively close to the metal, and don't really apply in quite the same way to digital consumer products. If anything, we're trending away from allowing much user customization on that end of things at the moment.