This post is in response to Brian Solis’ A conversation about you, social currency and social capital.

 We, users, have always been considered capital for marketers. Times changed and the wiggle dance evolved – but we remained as elusive and  are still unable to define our capital value as working currency we can capitalize on.

Our place in the marketing mix evolved, our influence grew – but a quantum leap is still in need.  Once companies owned the dancing floor. They had us, but didn’t see us for who we were. They courted us. As we strengthened, they tiptoed around us. Now they see us, infiltrate our spheres, try to converse with us, touch us and create value that would attract us  – but they  can no longer own us or dictate.

The game changed. Its semantics, power balance and arenas – but we, users, do not have yet full control. That control demands a paradigm shift – only then we will be able to exercise the real core of our capital – the power of sharing and influencing at will, as equal partners negotiating and being rewarded in the food chains created around us.

In the traditional marketing era we were customers, users. Companies’ value increased in parallel to the market chunk they held –it was measured by the percentage of the market share owned and by how much of the customer share they could aspire for.

We, consumers, were targeted through mass media, data companies and sophisticated marketing and sales promotions all across. Marketers owned the scene through aggressive push paradigms aimed at getting to us wherever we are and accumulating numbers of customers as a basis for the company’s value. We were capital as components within the marketing mix to be targeted and translated into siloed captivity schemes that would make it very difficult to switch and abandon loyal customer benefits defined and calculated for us.

With the advent of the internet, new semantics described our customer capital value. It was still measured in mass value terms and we were still faceless. For internet based companies we became eyeballs, and the value of the company was measured by the number of eyeballs it owned.  The model story of that era was the story in 1998 when AOL   purchased Mirabilis, the Israeli developer of the ICQ IM platform, with a free offering, no business model and no income, for its main asset – its  millions of eyeballs.

As web 2.0 evolved, we were no longer faceless. Web 2.0 was our web. We had voices, opinions, conversations. Marketers no longer owned the scene. We could independently comment, recommend, warn against, express our dissatisfaction and our peers would listen and be influenced. Marketing campaigns happened in parallel, detached from our conversations or at best responding.

Marketers had to be more careful about us. They had to become more credible to earn our trust, less intrusive in their attempts to reach us and less aggressive in their means to do so. They had to heavily invest to individually learn about each of us, hire 3^rd party companies to monitor us, get to us where we went and develop product lines and personalization schemes that would suit us as individuals. That was the beginning of the long tail economy.  Once selection is unlimited, storage is no issue and retailers no longer have to carry only the items their customers demand, each individual customer and each individual product have the same value. A real 1:1 with the hegemony and focal point totally shifted to the customer.

This pull based economic model for digital entertainment offerings meant individualized relations where customers own the scene and pull from providers what suits them best. This shift brought about a new phase of economic value – the value of recommendations. Amazon’s recommendation engine lay the foundations for a passive collaborative thread that allowed me, the individual, to be influenced by the interests of people like me. My choices and interests became of value as recommendations by the mere fact that they were mine and thus made me of value to my peers. The process was still faceless. I influenced and was influenced and marketers passively rode that wagon to enhance the personal suitability of their offerings to me.  

The next phase of the web acknowledged individual identity and built on that as user capital.  The individuality of each one of us can now be established on the web as a  micro universe of one –the long tail recognizes my individuality and singularity. Once the personal targeting phase became personified, my personal capital and value to marketers, got a new twist. I had a face. Marketers wanted to know all about me, in order to target me best, wherever I am.

Relevance to what I am looking at and real time accessibility to the message  was the name of the game, targeted ads that match ads to content I interconnect with, was the method.  My capital was translated to clicks and the currency was pay per click, first in search engines and later through sites and social platforms as well. But that again spelled as  currency to marketers alone.

 Once the social web evolved, my value as an asset and my capital exceeded the individual level, to express my significance in my social graph. I could acquire a multifaceted marketing value. My capital was measured by the place I have in my social sphere.  If once I was a distinct individual in a social surrounding and had to be individually targeted, now my social dimension entered the game. My whole social graph became of value because marketers saw in me an evangelism potential as a trusted source of recommendation.

Now I already had social capital, as Brian Solis calls it. Not only am I of value for marketers as me, a potential customer, not only is my value defined as a potential influencer to my social sphere, but my expanded social landscape makes me an anchor point to be valued on its social merit – how much do I tweet, comment, converse, participate, how many friends I have, how many, who and on how much do others respond to me. I am being targeted now for completely different reasons and invested in accordingly. Up to this point, my capital is objective and quantifiable for marketers.

But the next phase of the game – the one that will transfer the power of translating this customer capital into a currency that I can trade with – has not begun yet.

Two main components are still missing. Context and control.

contextonomics – the economics of my context – My personal context is the glue to establish my value as capital. My holistic context, that reflects who I am all across.

Companies still pay a lot to try and get closer to relevance – so that their offerings surface above the general marketing noise and get my attention. They measure it in terms of ROI (return on investment) – how much will it cost them to reach me, the individual. But once they reach me, how relevant is their offering to me? Again, the closest they can get through paid targeting is to what I am looking for right now, in search and some sites and social platform. To date my context is fragmented, dispersed all across the web.  They don’t have my whole context.

And that’s my real capital.

 My holistic context is a subjective scale that places the marketing message or offer at a personal relevance value to me individually. This is what will grab my attention the most and will turn my attention into an ROA ( return on attention) for marketers’ measuring scale.

In the same token, my social relevance to the targeted offer increases or decreases my value as a source of influence to my social sphere for that specific targeting. My being an ardent traveler and social influencer place my capital at still a higher level when I allude to a travelling related offer.

To date this subjective information about me cannot be objectified or turned into a tradable currency that I, the user, can benefit from and capitalize on.  

The other missing component in my ability to utilize my social capital is the dominance of a providers’ based top down paradigm.

Contextonomics  cannot become part of the loop as long as  I don’t have control over my data and my privacy and sharing settings,  as I am in no position to turn that data into an alternative currency I can trade with.

Only when paradigms will shift  , user centered paradigms will enter the game and ecommerce will become fully pull based, the whole marketing discourse will not ignore me as a natural component in the food chain created around me and will no longer exclude me from it. Providers share their profits with targeting companies, advertising agencies – but do not approach me directly for my relevant data and do not directly trade with over my attention. How about a marketplace where I can choose between  a free downloadable movie with 3 targeted ads or 4$ fee?

Only when these two elements that combine the economics of my context can be safely objectified under my control and user centered controlled systems will ensure my data’s privacy on my behalf – we will be able to translate our capital as customers and our social capital as influencers  into workable and tradable currency and become equal partners  in the marketing mix.    

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How can I track down old information about me that floats out there in the digital Ether? Whether I’m just  privacy sensitive and don’t want scraps of data around me dispersed all over without my knowing or control, wish to minimize places I registered to but did not deactivate, hate to think that companies out there manipulate my data, feel abused by the goldmine of my data that makes marketers and advertisers happy but leaves me out of the food chains, or wish to make old hunchbacks  that can be dug by search engines,  fade away – I can now have a personal privacy cleaner at my disposal.

A  US privacy company, Abine, launched DeleteMe - a “delete button for the Internet.”   It  tracks down, on users’ behalf,  traces of personal identity and information from data, passwords, profiles, and up to search results that make people unhappy, and erases them. Price is between 10$-100$, depending on  how much one wants to remove and from where.

I haven’t tried it, so I have no way of telling how thorough and efficient it is, and maybe in the distributed internet there can’t be a seal proof guarantee.

Regardless, the initiative deserves  praise for several grounds:

To start with – it’s a universal service that exceeds the boundaries of specific siloed sites. As such it takes a harmonized approach for my digital residues from a holistic point of view and caters for my privacy needs all across.

In the current state of web related privacy policies, where as a user I’m helpless in front of opaque data gathering in sites, can’t really keep track or notice data manipulation and have to deal with a plethora of privacy policies, it’s good to have a privacy policeman directly protecting my side, working on my behalf.

The business plan based on profit generated from direct provisioning for my privacy demands, is a trust enhancer because it assures no need or ulterior motives for my data manipulation as part of the company’s business plan . I pay – I’m the customer – they cater for my needs.

 Straight. Simple. Clean.

Also the cart of services they offer answers any need from any prism a user may wish for.

The company offers data removal methods activated through both automated tools and manual data manipulation in sites, that in itself promises a more thorough and systemic cleaning.

User side services such as DeleteMe that empower me, the individual, to take active control through outsourcing expert based is yet another step towards enhancing user centered paradigms and shift control over web interaction from providers to us users – an  important step towards a transparency culture and a cleaner web ecology.

@facebook.com – Messages – my unified messaging portal- I can now talk to my friends via all real time communication means from email and up to  SMS, chat  or Messages- all through a single entry point at Facebook.

A single social integrated Inbox for all social communication is  truly a  wonderful offer.Streamlined social communications with my chosen circle of friends.  Simple, intuitive, fluid.

Spam and noise out. A white list of selected friends’  circle in.

All courtesy of Facebook.

How efficient.

How comforting.

How tempting.

How frightening!

No doubt a unified messaging system with all my friends is the future. User side harmonization is good – it’s efficient, inclusive, friendly, streaming. Takes a holistic view of me as a user and attempts to fully and intuitively accommodate me, simplify my interactions and allows me to see a comprehensive picture of my communications with a specific friend via all instant means.

What does it require of me? To reveal a lot more.

Once I register to this new system, I give Facebook my cellular number,  and access to my IM and external e-mail systems. Facebook already has a list of all my friends and can rate their value to me based on my interactions.

The good news – I don’t need to expose my shoes and bra size.

What a bear hug!

Can we afford it? Is it worth the price?

There ’s no free meal.

Beware.

Facebook wants to be there every moment of the day in all our interactions, documentation of activities, social sphere.

There’s only one question – is it really an honest to God user side service?

In a corporate driven hegemony race, can what to us users is blessed harmonization be reconciled with giants’ interests for increasing customer share and captivity through consolidation? Are we being played into the giant war between Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Microsoft…

A war over enlarging user based virtual territories.

This integrated offer will tempt me to migrate from several walled gardens  of email, IM providers  and spend more time and communications in another walled garden – Facebook.

Will we wake up one morning to find contextual text ads on the sides of our IM and chats based on what and with whom we communicated?

Can we innocently trust Zuckerberg’s soothing privacy keeping promises or, given FaceBook’s history, is it just a  lip service? Are the technologies to ensure that really there?

Where will it evolve?

How long before a cellular @facebook messaging application is up – and then we’ll be under Facebook’s hug through all media, systems and devices?

Shall we gradually stop using other mail systems, and slip into @facebooks’ comfort zone?

Will the other companies gracefully surrender or will they have to integrate Facebook’s messages to their mail systems?

And the biggest question of all – what about our privacy, ownership of our data, visibility to what we talk about and with whom?

If we feared Google’s search monitoring – that’s nothing compared to the exposure level of Facebook’s aggregated messaging platform.

Day in and day out we are prey to business social platforms. Will advertisers lurk around our walls on Facebook, hunting for indicative communications  from this single inbox?

Facebook is the natural communication platform of youngsters who intuitively share all with Facebook friends. Many of them are unaware of the distinctions, privacy implications and the data preying industry that just looks for easier ways to get it all.

Do we really want all our interactions harmonized under the auspices of a commercial entity whose business model depends on 3^rd party interests and is not directly tied to us?

In order to gain our trust Facebook will have to give us full control over our privacy settings and full visibility of their data collection, storage and usability.  

And still it is not enough.

A true user centered  web is where services are built around me, the individual, and for me, opening up the soiled gardens of providers that aim to keep me captive in a comforting bear hug.

The future lies in real user side services. A user centered approach that treats my data as my asset to keep.

When we pay a bank to keep and manage our money – its revenue streams, obligations and commitment are directly to us. Reulations to that end protect us.

Our personal data is a valuable currency and should be managed by user side data base banks that are directly just as committed to us and regulated in the same manner.

Facebook has reached its 500 million user and, has thus turned into a huge global digital social state. For the digital literate it has become an infrastructure commodity, almost as much as electricity, gas, water or as Google for search. Facebook is a window to a personalized tribal fire that gathers around it the relevant friends of an interacting individual for sharing moments, ideas, experiences, plans.

But what about me? How can I, the individual Facebook user, feel comfortable on this huge platform and still maintain the intimacy, selective privacy and trust within our social spheres that reside in this huge digital society?

  Facebook defines itself as a social utility that helps people communicate more efficiently with their friends, family and coworkers. The turbine that runs this infrastructure is a swarm of personal digital connections, conversations and exchange of informations and experiences. In such intricate cobwebs of personalized social spheres, its inherent increasing return cycle will bring about its exponential future growth with exponential privacy, control of personal data, trust and scope of personal interactions related issues and apprehensions, and on the other hand, will make it harder to leave, as it increasingly becomes a commodity magnet.

Does the huge expansion of Facebook mean that I can have more friends on my social graph? Will that be any criterion to my popularity, value or place? The Dunbar number of 150 as representative of the upper limit number of social relationships that we can manage on an individual level, is also much too high when it comes to meaningful digital sharing within ones social sphere.

The most burning questions is not FaceBook’s dominance in the social networks markets – it’s the place of the individual in such an omnivoring social commodity.

The individual personal prism is the differentiating factor that sorts out the noise, creates a relevance hierarchy of importance, significance and degree of ties. That is true for both sides – me, the user, who wants to share with relevant people around relevant interactions, as well as providers and advertisers who want to target relevant customers for their offerings and not just shoot into the crowd.

Every personalized Facebook page becomes a personal pillar of individualism, shared through the eyes of the beholder with her Facebook friends. This individualized personal prism creates singular pages in a huge global yellow pages like digital address book.

Ideally, entrance, sharing and participation in these personalized windows to the digital lives of the owners’ pages are restricted to the friends and friends of friends of that individual.

In reality, flocks of hungry advertisers lurk under these windows, plotting  how to enter these personalized circles and harness the private social spheres. Their aim is to turn  those trusting friends under the auspices of the individual camp fire, to their advocates, ambassadors and evangelists to their offerings, be it through willing participation or  piggybacking by turning social sphere lists into social graphs in social marketing mixes.

From my point of view, I, the user, want to be in control of what I share with whom, how and by what degree of connectedness. It is subjective, individual, dynamic, and transcends the boundaries of Facebook as a connectivity platform.

My context in Facebook, is a beacon that should shine for my entourage, and only if I choose to, be made available, under my explicit consent, to be shared as part of a commercial CRM effort.

Yet my Facebook context is not separated from my overall context as I surf the web, search, converse, communicate, read and interact.

Restricting context to my Facebook interactions, even if they are part of a huge global social infrastructure, does not reflect my whole context as a person. I call a world that will have a personalized contextual prism – Contextivity.

Contextivity  is about MY Context all through, across platforms, providers and predefined issues. Contextivity turns imprisoned, fragmented personalization into  a harmonized experience that meshes my context with connectivity. It makes my digital choices and interactions natural, intuitive, gives it my personal colors.

Facebook’s platform is perfectly situated to become a central junction that combines connectivity to context and become the infrastructure for digital relations, based on selective context lens, relevant to a specific exchange, a true personal experience.

However, once such holistic contextification services are developed, that very combination makes it all the more acute that all context based activities remain user side, in her control and not be owned or manipulated by any single provider, especially as big and fundamental in the utility like service it provides, like Facebook .

Google TV, the new Google, Sony and Intel initiative  has a potential to dramatically change the way we view TV today. Google has partnered with Sony and Intel to create a Google TV, made by Sony and powered by Intel chips that would enable a big-screen living-room web experience.

Such a set top box will become a central home portal for managing content and connectivity interactions for the whole household, through personalized handling mechanisms and will enhance new value chains, business models and consumption patterns. It will empower a TV anytime environment and will revolutionize the way TV content is consumed, to resemble web 2.0 seamless culture.

Today there are inherent gaps between passive TV viewership and interactive web navigation. Introducing Google search capabilities will make viewership intuitive when changing from a lean back TV mode into the lean forward web based interactivity.

TV viewership is passive by nature. You watch programs within channels, in a push mode, have no ability to interact with content, family or friends in real time around the viewed content items.

 More advanced set top boxes allow for limitedpull capabilities, services and VOD (view on demand) that are based on pull and active selection of what to view and when.

A web based, Google empowered TV will enable dimensions that do not exist today. It will turn the passive TV experience into a connected and shared experience and will bring connectivity to an audience that had no accessibility to the digital empowerment of the web. It will empower interactions with content in various interactive ways, web based services and new food chains around content consumption, targeted ads and up to commercialization of items and social media connectivity through the living room screen, by facilitating communicating with family members and friends in real time around a viewed program.

The digital divide is especially prominent in regard to TV, Internet and IPTV. Older generations, who are more technophobes, tend to choose the passive, coach potato like TV viewership. It’s a medium which is familiar to them, with which they feel safe. At the same time, many boomers are used to the basic Google interfaces, as search is one of the basic functions they know how to make on the web. Google should take an inclusive approach and introduce a simplified intuitive interactive TV interface that will bridge the digital divide  and provide a gateway to the connected interactive web world through simplified user friendly usability and interaction patterns.

TV viewers will change from passive spectators to active designers of their available or tailored options.  The borderline between traditional television and Internet will become obsolete, to be replaced by full media convergence. The origin of the content – TV or web based, will become immaterial; the only factor will be the relevance to viewers’ affinities and choices.

A new era of TV viewership that will integrate social media with traditional broadcast media, will empower a whole social interaction infrastructure around programs. From the simple connectivity with family and friends, sharing views and feelings  around a viewed program and up to creating ad hoc social communities of interest, encompassing the TV equivalent to location awareness – like who is watching this and that program now – from within my social sphere and up to real time communities created around a broadcasted program.

Challenges that lie ahead for achieving a flowing Google TV experience include issues such as:

• Privacy considerations
• Personalization – profiling users and monitoring their viewership to create a predictive user context and recommendation offerings
• Harmonizing offerings around users – from viewership, connectivity and up to commercialization
• DRM (digital rights management) issues – taking care of the rights of all participants in the new food chains created around pull based TV viewership 
• Audio-Visual content indexing to enhance  searchability
• Harmonized  tagging and referencing schemes  from various broadcasters
• Simple navigation and selection in the converged multimedia and TV content offerings enabled through a search engine
• Creation   of personalized accessibility in a TV Google web based portal that can be intuitively adapted to personal choices, habits and connectivity patterns.
• Harmonization of TV and web based business models and food chains to create new long tail TV based economic opportunities.
• New ad based personalization and targeting models
• Translating elements from the participatory web to be enhanced around  TV  programs, communities of interest and social web aspects.

 Personalizing TV viewership and translating it into a web like searchable experience is a very significant step in adapting   the web to larger audiences and turning the living room into a TV web based personal portal.  

Google is in a perfect position to lead the home TV revolution. Google has reorganized the distributed content on the web to make it searchable for its users, and capitalize on it as its ad based revenue making platform for the digital world.  Google sells its online advertising through a unique online model, where every Google search is analysed to determine which advertisers are best matched to get exposure through the “sponsored links” on every results page.

Imagine Google reorganizing the TV and web based multimedia distributed content to make it searchable, build new on demand, pull based food chains and activate its analysis tools to retarget the repository of TV ads, the engine at the heart of commercial TV economics. Such a disruptive TV ad based system will replace the traditional TV ad spot buying with fully automated digital marketplace systems, by best matching relevance to individual spectators, in a web like manner. The same data mining methods at the heart of content searchability, users’ data collection, ad placement and their respective matching mechanisms can create an increasing return cycle for all the food chains, business models and for all the participants in the new TV based environment, with Google’s engines at its heart.

 Let’s only hope that in the process Google will manifest the due respect, transparency and sensitivity to its users’ trust, privacy, choices and affinities.    

 Disclaimer:  I have a traditional commercial  TV background. Also, already in 2000 I was involved in the global TV anytime forum  and over the years I was involved in additional digital TV initiatives.

Reading Danah Boyd’s post Speaking about privacy and publicity , where she reminded corporates about the people behind the users, felt almost like reading The Emperor’s new clothes.  Only here the cloaks the naked emperors of the digital world lack are those of basic empathy, consideration  and  respect.   The humane aspects that Danah discusses seem so obvious, that they hardly need stating. Danah shakes the dust from the technical, analytical, functional approach at the heart of current attitudes of the Facebooks, Googles  of the digital world,  because it looks like, in the  Darwinistic struggle for hegemony over our  social  web,  the industry forgot the basics about social visibility– the vulnerabilities, private sensitivities, individual boundaries, of the clients that are there to serve, to start with.

There are so many talks going on about the era of publicy, the generational inclinations of millennials to lead a public life, functionality, technology aspects – that the people, flesh  blood and soul are almost left out. The web is our digital habitat.  The notion of a private home can be equaled on the web to a private self, the right to individually decide if and to what extent open or close the  personal information tap.

Industries that build their revenue streams on manipulating our data, targeting us for relevant ads, invade our social spheres and turn it into social media as part of a marketing mix, cannot be sensitive to the personal touch of the people they serve. The lines of individuals are thin, fragile and vulnerable. But who are we?  just users, the milked cows, and so can be manipulated for corporates’ profit generation  while they hide behind the small print of privacy settings that almost no one reads.

I was reminded of the poem “curriculum Vitae” by the polish poet Wislawa Szymborska –the 1996 Literature  Nobel prize winner, and the dichotomy between the tangible and intangible aspects of relating to people in a corporate setting.  

“What must you do?

You must submit an application
and enclose a Curriculum Vitae.

Regardless of how long your life is,
the Curriculum Vitae should be short.

 Be concise, select facts.
Change landscapes into addresses and
vague memories into fixed dates.

 Of all your loves, mention only the marital,
and of your children, only those who were born.

 It is more important who knows you
than whom you know.
Travels – only if abroad.
Affiliations – to what not why.
Awards – but not for what.

 Write as if you never talked with yourself,
as if you looked at yourself from afar.

 Omit dogs, cats and birds,
mementos, friends, dreams.

 State price rather than value,
title rather than content.
Shoe size, not where one is going;
the one you are supposed to be.
Enclose a photo with one ear showing.

What counts is its shape, not what it hears.
What does it hear?
The clatter of machinery that shreds paper.

In our case – it’s the clutter of $ machines, capitalizing on our data. Can you trust the cat with the cream?  Do we have to trust privacy management policies dictated by interested corporates?

The answer lies in a new privacy paradigm – an Iprivacy lens that stems from the following principles:

• No commercial corporate, acting for its own capital gain, should own my data or have the ability to manipulate or expose it unsolicited.
• No commercial entity should arbitrarily and unilaterally dictate what offerings are integrated to the services and what their consequences are to me – and force me to struggle to undo what they decided for me should be automatically activated.

• The only person that is allowed to have the keys to my personal data and the segregations I want to make about my interactions is me.
• Ownership of my data, my visibility and my sharing handles should be at my sole control.

New technologies, together with the ubiquity of cloud computing, will empower new kinds of aggregators and providers that will work on our behalf and reverse the mindsets towards new paradigms and a cleaner web ecology.

Indeed it’s not binary – transparency, empathy, mutual respect and fair trade do not mean the end of capitalism.  The participatory web does not mean that all doors are wide open for unsolicited public sharing. We will still be happy to pay for services we get – paying methods are varied. Jeopardizing our privacy for a seemingly free meal can be a very high price to pay – the problem is that people realize it only after they have been wounded, this way or another.

 Putting us back in our rightful place can transform the business  of social media. Corporates will come to realize that they do not have to master the whole process. Food chains around our data can still be a revenue source for good services they provide, only withwilling participation of all parties involved and  fair reward to all participants. Working with us and not through us empowers a whole new business culture. Corporates can still thrive and prosper, but they have to maintain their relevance to the culture we, their users, cultivate. Once this shift of mind is established – we can harness them to take part in new paradigms  that empower our aware and willing participation in the processess and food chains created around us.

It’s a quantum leap – it’s up to us.

Barter = exchange of goods or services for other goods or services.

 The internet facilitates the creation of context based marketplaces that are economically driven and have built in reward motivations and incentives for collaboration. Digital bartering through internet based platforms is a great bartering platforms facilitator, due to the ease of use, immediate accessibility and the transactional capability of connecting people with needs to other individuals or providers, capable of satisfying these needs.

 The simplest form of digital bartering was at the hardware level – bartering idle computing resources.

Goggle is a kind of a digital barter enabler. Google reorganizes information to make it accessible through a specific individual search prism based on users’ queries. To users, it provides search results and thus empowers free access to content. In return it uses its search platform to enable advertisers accessibility to users and derives from that its ad based revenue streams.

In the era of direct conversations, link back from content, blogs and texting is also a way of bartering, although a more fluid one. Still it creates an increasing returns cycle of introductions to relevant content and all participants benefit.

Attention bartering means exchanging consumption of digital goods or services with attention – a more sophisticated form of digital bartering. Attention bartering  is a new manifestation of the long tail economy.

 Historically, in traditional media, ad related and content bartering was done mainly between corporates. Web based, context oriented bartering can be between direct individuals, through peer to peer mechanisms, or through providers or 3^rd parties.

Digital content consumption platforms empower the ability to select personalized commercial targeting for the same content item by incorporating a variety of aggregation and distribution channels with different value adding chains and financial reconciliation mechanisms.

 It empowers new mechanism of exchange, new kinds of aggregators. A converged unified TVIP based, social media 2.0 environment allows for diversified food chains around the same content items. To name a few:

• A pay-per-view viewership of a sports match with additional prior matches of the player who scored highest or the winning team for different bundling with targeted ads and related commercial offerings for diferent price options.
• A choice of a pay per view movie, leading to additional movie offerings with the same actors/director, combined with all sorts of monitory or context + ad or merchandising bundling.
• Aggregators and providers will have banks of advertising, ads will be pulled and the advertiser rewarded for each ad sent in a pull model to a viewer.
• Users can allow companies use their profiles or data for market research, targeting and get rewarded directly as part of the food chain created around them by content offerings, digital coupons, merit points…..

From the economic sense of the web service provider  this means that each transaction executed by any of its consumers, can be monetized in full and paid directly or traded, fully or partially, for alternative service. One consumer, one movie to watch for 50% discount + 3 targeted ads or one movie to watch full price – same value.

Icentricity calls for a reversal in the foundation of transactions, anchoring it on the user negotiating with a cloud of vendors of similar offering through an array of alternative paying methods rather than a vendor negotiating with a cloud of users.

From an Icentered point of view, there is a large inventory of providers and an array of bartering options from which to choose. For the user one movie + 3 targeted ads that spell 50% discount on actual payment  + attention allocation to ads that may targeted to relevant  interests and lifestyle, or one movie full price no ads (assuming same cost) is not necessarily the same. Yet, choice, value and preferences are individual.

Social networks’ integration/diversification of offerings is the new frontier in the war over web dominance, and we may be left wounded in the battle field. It is therefore time to rethink the basic paradigms that dictate our current social communications. After all, it is about us, not about the companies that serve us.

Social networks are consolidating and it will reshape our communication ways. For us our social networks are the town squares, the camp fires around which we share, converse, expose…. All the major players are adding features so that their offerings in order to  capture a larger users’ activity share on their communications platforms. They all want to be the platform of choice over which we manage our relationships, turn it into an ad delivery multi headed monster, and draw the golden eggs of the ad and targeting based revenue streams associated with it. 

The results – borders are blurring, distinction features between the web technology moguls are fading, web based interaction is going one level higher on all fronts – and we users, are faced with situations that demand a new level of awareness – we need a new set of active choices to optimize our interactions in the over exposure to all our social networks’ activities and a stronger privacy lens in our watching eye – we need to protect ourselves, as we are being exposed and targeted on all fronts, since marketers will strive to find us wherever we are.

We can’t control this blurring, or at least it demands a proficiency level that is not intuitive to all mainstream users, and eventually it may cause many of us to lose all the trust we might have had in parts of the offerings they had all together, so that a supposed added app blessing, will turn into a core service curse.

Until today the distinction was quite clear:

• When I want to answer a dedicated mail message I use outlook, Gmail….
• When I just want a short comment – I tweet (140 characters)
• When I want a short personal message -  I use IM, SMS
• When I want  a one to many  communication channel I use my social network – e.g. Facebook
• When I want it for a vertical communication channel like profession related – I use LinkedIn.
• When I want to share my thoughts or muse on an issue – I blog.

With such “communication empire” under my command, each provider wants to become a full scale communication platform, and they all start to look alike. When they all offer me the same, duplication is redundancy, and privacy, segregation and verticalization considerations may leave me more confused and eventually cause me to drop some – so that in fact channels that wanted to do it all for me, risk losing me all together.

Attempts to sort it out primarily focus on comparing their benefits for the industry’s sake, so they will know how to best target their customer in the tectonic shifts that are dynamically changing the balances, not from my users’ point of view of how we may optimally benefit and still feel secure.

First thing first – how is the scene changing? Facebook, Twitter, Google and even Microsoft are radically harnessing the missing components

It started out in a war between FaceBook and Twitter and the battle field was data portability. From FaceBook’s Connect to third party sites, Twitter’s answer, and MySpace following.

Then it scaled up. From basic blurring, like the Twitterization of Facebook to a full communication platform. Facebook ‘s Titan  project – a full fledged web mail system that will make full mailing from the Facebook platform simple and intuitive. This is more strategic, because it makes the lines between Twitter, Facebook, MySpace…. really blur.

Along comes Google’s Buzz and changes the scene. By harnessing a whole social network from millions of dispersed Gmail web mail users into a global social network, integrating blogs,  Twitter, Google Reader shared items, photos and other feeds, Buzz aims for the slot of placing it all under Gmail  - our one to one, one to many, segregated sharing, full exposure – and hence the hegemony over all our web communication.  

Where does it all go? According to Google, to a universal map of monitoring users wherever ( mobile and location awareness), whatever (desktop Buzz integration) with whoever ( social integration) in real time as the fertile ground for an ad based world that will follow us in all our activities and whereabouts, and will pop up offerings in our faces every mile of the way, every minute of the day, every click we make.  

Privacy fears

 Privacy and social networks are not two contradicting hiding and sharing  terms.  The balance and the granularity of exposure and sharing  is a very personal decision. Buzz’s initial fully automated set up option of full exposure of correspondences and contact lists, addresses, activities, scanning mails…..violated its very essence.   No one has the right to assume such a totally ubiquitously naked world. They failed to give us the keys for choosing what, when, with whom, how. They lost the trust of is users’, breaching such basic privacy issues to such an extent is outrageous. No matter how its leaders will apologize for the privacy breach and bullying forcing of the service and allude it to their being novices in the social sphere (is that so?  Do they really not fully understand the market they came to serve or seeing us as means to an end was above all?) It does not matter – they have won their sit in the pantheon of corporate predators we should look out from.

Gmail is an email service. Capitalizing on my mailing list to allow Google to create an active social network on my back without my consent or active optioning is a digital rip off; entangling us, users, in impossible cross options, so that no matter what you do, somehow leaves your private information open and searchable, is a faux pas much more than any other communication platform, because many of us use other Google applications to manage digital life as a commodity. Google Inside has turned into an omnivore that coarsely invades every ounce of privacy and selection criteria we may have. It not only holds us captive, but strips us naked in the town square.

It is inconceivable that we will have to look for ways to protect ourselves from companies who are supposed to provide us service for our own good. Can a “no shame” scale based titan culture abolish all the basic axioms of relations between providers and users and settle for lip service?

This may be the last straw to show how acutely a paradigm shift is needed:

• No commercial corporate, acting for its own capital gain, should own my data or have the ability to manipulate or expose it unsolicited.
• No commercial entity should arbitrarily and unilaterally dictate what additional offerings become integrated to the services and what their consequences are to me – and force me to struggle to undo what they decided for me should be automatically activated.
• The only person that is allowed to have the keys to my personal data and the segregations I want to make about my interactions is me.
• Ownership of my data, my visibility and my sharing handles should be at my sole control.

Too much demands a context filter as a protection means

From our point of view – this entire saturated social environment is becoming exhausting. Too much diversification, parallel platforms to manage, social duplications.   I can get lost  in the multi management and so can my privacy, jeapordising also sensitivity to  the privacy of the people in my social sphere.

 Less networks with more meaning seems the natural next step. Less is more. Absolutely. Less with meaning is even more.  To me meaning spells context or relevance. When everything is searchable, context becomes a compass that leads the relationship overflow.

The context of what I communicate about and with whom, or the personal relevance of what is being communicated to me – that is the decisive noise selector in the avalanche of web sociality. Contextivity is humanizing. I am in the center and my dynamic personal context is a guiding principle for a new level of conversations. It turns 6 degrees of separation into 6 degrees of connectedness. Once context based interactions’ keys are established, the delivery platform is less important.

This is why context is the next Holy Grail that technology titans will hunt for. I, the user, want a single place (doesn’t have to be a server – can very well reside in the Cloud) where all my info, connections, personal stuff (photos, books, social networks, profiles) are stored and I can manage that.

However, mastering contextual personalization must be in the hands of the only one who should know all about me in order to draw my context – and that is me! Assuming that not all people are techno savvy to mange that, companies that will be establish to handle my profile derivatives on my behalf should be strictly liable  like banks and credit card companies that manage my financial assets and as such are bound to me  and my privacy under strict regulations.

A higher level of manageability will come to be when communities of interest, devoid from financial imperialistic considerations, will become “users’ data bankers” of users’ profiles’ data repositories on their behalf, to assure cleanliness  transparency and inclusion of users’ in all the food chains created on top of their data.

 A catch.

It is not in any provider’s interest to allow me that. Would you voluntarily hand over the chicken coop with the golden eggs? It is all the more reason why context keys must remain in our hands. Our personal context is our asset to expose or share at our will, with the keys in our hands.

We must cry out and ban anti web culture activity that disregards us as the purpose core of the services we consume.

It is up to us – if we all harness bottom up our demands and the way we want it, our voice can serve to help corporates’ leaders and policy to make the right decisions that will not alienate us and will harness a win-win trust and loyalty based modus vivendi between all participants in the food chains. To empower it, an icentered paradigm shift is needed that will establish cleaner meaning based interactions.

“Who I am, who do I know, what do I do “.

Knowing this about you and me is Google’s  social master plan. It was displayed by  David Glazer, an engineering director at Google, and quoted by Liz Gannes.

Glazer says:

” If you use Google products, the company already knows who your most important contacts are, what your core interests are, and where your default locations are… expect many product and feature launches that start to connect that information in useful ways.”

Who I am is my prerogative to share. What volume exactly does this question encompass is also my prerogative to define. It is not an engulfing praise of anonymity – it is a worldview   that gives us, individuals, the right to define the spectrum of exposure (automatic identification, full display, level of bio and demographics, exposure per transaction/instance, as a starting point,….

 Who do I know   - the holy grail of social marketing. My social graph- with whom do I converse? As part of a social graph I am a trusted source. A recommendation or reference from me has a much higher value.

What do I do  - monitoring my actions, what do I read, share, converse about, save

Connect the information in useful ways – for whom? 

It will definitely create an increasing returns cycle for Google.  As customers of their revenue streams (ad agencies), the wider the range of their visibility into who we are and what we do, the stronger their dominance. Having an indispensible role at both ends of the food chain –our databases as goldmines for advertisers.

With food comes appetite, I can’t think of a better motivation for Google to do everything it can to strengthen its essential role in all food chains around us.

Google search, Gmail, Google Maps, FeedBurner, YouTube, Google Reader, Google Latitude, Google Chrome… all about my web based actions, whereabouts, identity, location. Add to that 23and me,  the DNA decoding company where Google has a stake – and Google will also know where I am from and where I am going – one phase shorter from an omnipotent know-all, sell all, profit from all…

Well, on this journey, we’re all on the wrong bus!

Connecting the dots means, from Glazer’s point f view that applications are no longer siloed within Google, but interoperable and one in the service of the other to offer full scale based results and services.

Can we live without Google? I don’t think so, and we shouldn’t.

But we should fear Google as Big Brother!

 Do we want an open web that has Google Inside components in every aspect of our interactions?  Do we want Google’s lens as an extrovert window into everything we do on the web?

The industry will not fight our war. The web  and our social spheres are ours. An open interoperable social web is what we all strive for, but not dominated by a social identity omnivore.

It is up to us to claim our rightful place.

What can make the web truly ours?

• Open platforms  that cultivate interoperability
• Open code, shared and developed bottom up by all – for the mutual benefits of all
• Social businesses that are built around long tail micro rewards depending on the food chains created around users. Since we are the core of all these food chains they want to monopolize, we should put us in our rightful place.
• Transparent food chains where we are a legitimate part of the food chains created by us, a clear and transparent partner to these food chains and be rewarded as well.
• Reversing the paradigms – from PUSH to Pull
• Instead of us depending on providers’ facilitated services, providers asking us for the right to target and offer us.
• Creation of new middle grounds, symbols and codes that will give users handles of assessing their level of exposure and  creating the mindset and culture that providers will be considered green and ethical if they post it
• Total transference of balance – I, user, am in the driver’s seat, with the wheel in my hand, deciding to what extent I want to disclose, share or hide.   
• Shifting the focus to concerns on quality of service, satisfaction, new value chains….   
• Connecting  users and activities around specific context, where users have dominance over their context.    

Something is rotting in the kingdom of Facebook.

In a TechCrunch live interview two days ago Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook founder, said that if he were to create Facebook again today, user information would by default be public. Zuckerberg says that people have really gotten comfortable not only sharing more information but more openly and with more people, and that privacy was no longer a ‘social norm’, it had just evolved over time.

At the same time, in the name of a new privacy policy, Facebook has reset its privacy settings in a way that exposes its users’ names, profiles, demographics, social graphs and pages they subscribe to, as publicly available information on Facebook, for everyone on the web to see or search.

 What does Facebook own today that they want to capitalize on?

• The profile information of 350 million people
• The social graph of their family and friends
• The content they put up – personal, social,
• The sharing path of content and people

________________________________________

Sum total – the wet dream of every marketer, advertiser and data miner to tap into.

When a company can monetize the private data of 350 million users, sugarcoating it with philosophical claims of openness in sharing, reflecting social norms and feeling the pulse of current privacy related zeitgeist, calls for more than just raising an eyebrow.

Who gave Facebook the mandate to define what current social norms are? When a commercial company, in prey of  revenue streams, claims to be the canon of privacy related zeitgeist – you can take it at its face level or understand that you are watching  the sliding door to Heart of darkness.

Facebook started out on a trust platform. You place your information in their hands  and they provide you with the handles to share it at will with whoever you wish, according to your personal privacy inclinations – It is yours to expose or withhold.

The fact of the matter is that  Facebook has been toying with privacy related policies,  talking the talk but not walking the walk.  

Was it only two years ago that Facebook launched Beacon, a system that tracks activities from other web sites and  sends  information about the actions of Facebook users on their site to Facebook system. It raised such a turmoil over privacy concerns that Zuckerberg had to publicly apologize for the faux pas he did and change it into an opt-in feature. He said then “Facebook has succeeded so far in part because it gives people control over what and how they share information”

Now it seems that as the sounds of $  roar in Zuckerberrg’s ears, this understanding of what should lie at the heart of such a  trust based service, evaporates. Their latest move of opening users’ personal data , a treasure box for 3^rd party data mining companies and a targeted advertising platform, rather than an anthropological reflection of a no privacy culture.

Zuckerberg  is creating a self fulfilling prophecy. Disguising himself as just a trend spotter, he will impose open settings, will assume that the critical mass of users will not really be aware of what is being done, and even if they are, will not know how to go about it,  and then will be able to prove his claim that privacy is no longer a social norm. Therefore it is legitimate, and maybe even natural, to open all settings for the public to see, showings statistical data of 350 million users where the majority does not actively oppose such an exposure.

The situation where a capitalistic corporate keeps personal data and social graphs of 350 million people hostages of their flinging interests  of whether to respect or abuse their individual privacy choices must be reversed.

It is an offense to the basic contract between a serving company and the well being of the users it serves. Facebook is the leader of the web’s social revolution – 350 million users are the living proof. As such it should have a moral obligation to the millions who trusted their personal connectivity with that platform.

As for the debate over privacy.  Zuckerberg’s speech only shows the need for a paradigm shift in privacy management. The icentered privacy paradigm reverses the order and frees me, the user, from any dependence on the good will of providers to protect my interests. It rewrites the book, placing me, at the center, to take charge.

• My data, profile, social graph are mine – nobody owns me
•  The only one who knows all about me is me
•  I will expose/ share/hide as much as suits me personally.
• I am in the driver’s seat with the reins in my hands
• I and only I proactively manage my privacy and trust

And as for an age of no privacy – that’s a very legitimate debate, as long as it is done on neutral grounds, with no ability to abuse. When Stow Boyd claims that we are in  a decade of publicy, you may agree or disagree, but he is not harmful.

When Zuckerberg is in a position to gain millions from abusing personal data of his users, his social sensitivity to fluctuation norms should be taken with a huge pinch of salt.

Today’s zeitgeist strives for a cleaner web ecology, based on transparency, authenticity and trust. We strive for leaders and CEOs that manage their companies not just for financial results, but by values that guide their management.