This blog entry is about the death of standardized compliance.

We’ve gone a long way from mass marketing and categorization to the individualization and long tail choices as defining digital traits, where each one of us is a micro universe of one.  To the institutions we interact with – from commercial suppliers, through brands and government based services, we, users, are largely still links in chains of commercial, organizational and governmental goal achievements processes. The non uniformity of the people that comprise the client base, audience, market share… may already seem obvious , but it still not taken as an axiomatic key stand point .

Seth Godin’s new book We are all weird is a tale of individuality, of celebrating the uniqueness of each one in every food chain. Weird, as not standardized, talks to generalizing providers and institutions, and praises individuality as a stand point for interactions with people with a cynical reference to normality, as an outdated lens for definitions and processes.

Yes, the future belongs to individuals, to a mindset that replaces standardization with the humanification of interactions. Once the user is put at the center, not as a usability and marketing communication cliché’ of form, but as a fundamental matter, the real human value of user centricity and citizen centricity comes to life. To each of us our individually significant actions and choices are our own tales of individuality that strengthen our meaningful and valuable choices and interactions.

Icentricity is a philosophical identity definition that exceeds the individual yet gives a personal print and control on who, what, where, when and why.  Taking an independent yet very personal prism, enables a framework of the unique individual ecosystem of one that interacts with everybody else.

When each one of us has so many personal expressions across so many platforms, we need to take the individual fingerprint that on one hand sets us apart as individuals but on the other hands defines us and our say as parts of collectives in these frameworks.

The Icentered lens is an individual grasp for interactions, a prism that helps separate the wheat from the chaff in the overload of seemingly not connected interactions. It is a framework for a larger process that gives a context for the place of the individual in relations with providers, peers, friends, organizations….. Godin’s book is yet another call to start and exercise this distinct personal mark that sets me apart from everyone else and makes categorizing, segmenting, profiling me…. Impossible.

With the ubiquitous connectedness that enables us to be distributed across many platforms, across many contexts and interactions, Icentricity provides a looking glass that sometimes takes a step back to oversee and sometime to focus on how I am in a particular set of interactions – social, professional, or information based and how I relate to other people in social circles and in service providing systems.

Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare,  Google, cloud computing, mobile web.….. offer us an always on, accessible, knowledgeable social world, that keeps us connected physically and socially. This liquid web, as  Stowe Boyd calls it, is an immersive experience that makes us much more involved.

In the intersection between social graphs and interest graphs new relations between people and content are created.  He assumes that different consumer segments need different technological  support tools. In distinguishing between traditional, online and social consumers, users become stakeholders in the attention economy, as they draw their information not only from different content and social resources, but refine their relevant interactions through communication tools such as tweets, retweet, comments…    all create a very different user experience.

From an Icentered point of view, where I (the digital I of each user) strive for an adaptive web, tailored to personal choices and preferences – the human link of the single user still has a long way to go.

User centricity is about us, people. Yet it still takes a systemic view of the we interact with those tools and infrastructures, and how we become more immersed in this ubiquitous web.

Taking a different prism, an inside- out lens, the Icentered one, makes it more humanized. From that point of view It’s about us as people, not just users – centered or captive. To truly personify our web experiences, a deeper degree of individual personal signature should be called for.

Our personal data, real-time experience and interest based social graphs empower more humane social experiences, but the missing link is still personal context. Social humanification in smaller groups, such as the one offered by Flink12 that humanizes the social experience by creating social circles of no more than 12 people , is easier, because it reflects real life circles of interaction ad is initiated and moderated directly by users.

We need to control and manage more than just users’ privacy settings in various sites. We need to control in the same way Flink12 empowers us to connect at will people close to us around a specific subject, to connect our identity, data and sharing options from various sites around a topic that interests us in an inclusive holistic way that reflects us in our interactions around that topic.  This translates to contexting us, people, and not just a single thread of content. In such a Icentered reality, when I am in full possession of my personal information,  meshing all my interactions  around a specific topic within a specific interweb. Interwebs, as Venkatesh Rao explains,” is the perfect term for framing our experience of the Web today as an intricate mesh of play and storytelling that is enacted across many media and modes, an experience that is characterized primarily by its plurality A pattern of use with content, temporal and social dimensions, that evolves, lives for a while, and dies or morphs into something else.…”. For a short while, an individualized personalization hub is created. Since I own my representation, and am empowered to directly manage my privacy and trust regime, it completely sidesteps the exposure problem.

I, the individual user, am the glue that interconnects one inclusive context around many interwebs and allow an individual prismatic view of a thread/experience/ topic/action.

Once I, the individual user, create my personalized story, it is the context that makes it unique and  turns the overwhelming overpour of the liquid web into a humane selective experience .

Immersive Labs, a NY based  start up,  builds billboard technology that can target you, personally, and present relevant ads on bill boards.  Promising? Frightening? definitely intriguing.

A closer examination reveals that this is no scene from Minority Report and your iris data are not being read to target you with direct messages.

 In fact a combination of real time, location based, combined with age and gender reading from cameras in locations where the bill boards are placed, make it possible to change ads based on the age group and activity that takes place and segment age and gender based ads in real time.

This does not fall under the category of personally targeted ads as it lacks the personal context of each person that passes near the billboard. If a 30 years old woman passes by and a disposable diaper ad appears, it’s not because they know her identity, number of young children  and the fact that her credit card shows baby related shopping, but because she falls under age and gender based segmentation.

 So for the time being – fear not the retailer’s  big brother’s eye on you just yet – with ubiquitous connectivity, smart gadgets and an always on life style, the future of  personal targeting will some day  be in time and place defined real personalized ad placement on your personal mobile device once you enter a location, based on your very personal context, purchase history – the semantic web vision and internet of things that will eventually connect, combine data and screen each of us very very  personally.

A dooms day or real user centered scenario – depends on where you stand in the privacy/sharing debate.   Let’s hope that till this happens, privacy keeping and sharing mechanisms will  be as developed as the semantic context based  profiles that will allow such individually targeted ads.

Respecting people’s  data as currency and putting its management in the hands of consumers, is threatening tracking, behavioral targeting , marketing and advertising companies, who base their traditional food chains on tracking and purchasing users’ data for the online advertising industry.

Personal information enables pinpointing on personal context which in turn spells relevant, and translates to targeted offerings and ads. The interests of providers and consumers are not that contradictory. Whereas providers look at me, the consumer, and want ROI =return on their investment for targeting me with relevant offers, I am looking at ROA=return on attention, and may be open to what, in my context, interests me.

With the shifts in internet marketing, these  interests will have to evolve. We , consumers are changing and so should marketing discourse. We  are moving to pull based models , we own conversations and change loyalties by a simple click away.  Providers and advertisers are welcome to directly ask and get our cooperation and responses.

From an icentered point of view – reversing the paradigm is natural. My data, my context, are mine. I own it and I am the only one who can proactively manage my privacy and sharing. The economics of my context – contextonomics  is a currency, yet no one has the right, unsolicited,  to infiltrate my spheres, monitor my actions and patterns and hover around, manipulating my data.

A Wall street Journal article describes several start-up initiatives that start catering for user centered needs and empower active trading of personal data by users.

 There are two sides to this coin. On the one hand, companies like Myid , Intelliprotect , Abine, that block online tracking, together with privacy groups and federated identity initiatives, represent the user side privacy protection and give privacy management services to prevent companies from viewing  results of tracking data, without direct consumer consent.

On the other side, companies like Personal Inc, i-allow  pay people a commission on their consent to share their data with marketers and advertisers.

These companies are pioneering initiatives that cater directly for user centered data on her behalf.  That in itself is a significant move towards a real user centered marketing paradigm.

Treating data as currency does not end in placing individuals as partners in food chains created around them. Contextualization mechanisms are not ripe yet to allow for context based transactions that exceed observation of raw data.

Once user side contextualization will mature, it can evolve to serve as alternative currency, in the struggle over a user’s’ attention.

 In a long tail data based economy, attention bartering  can be translated to different food chains on digital content consumption platforms. E.g, 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 different 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…..

Managing an attention economy and filtering out the clutter through personal relevance in the overpour of information, becomes an urgency. In the attention economy our most scarce resource is time. It’s a two headed dilemma:  Am Iwasting my limited attention capacity on things I could do without? Am I missing, in all that noise, things I would have wanted to give attention to?

The answer to both questions is context, personal relevance as a key to web interactions.

Relevant to me.

In my context.

Relevance turns the overwhelming overpour of web interactions into a humanizing selective experience. It’s the difference between searchability and findability, an avalanche of information and a manageable portion where I have my attention focused on what is really of value to me and I where I can selectively communicate.

Relevance is predictive. Based on my past interactions, my next future needs can be attended to. Companies pay a lot to try and get closer to my 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 do, 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, siloed sites that keep my profile and based on current interactions in social platforms.

As users we want to interact with information that answers a need we have.   For that relevance is key. To date there is no holistic context of me that can capture a full relevance scale and be federated by me. My context is fragmented, dispersed all across the web. From a users’ perspective personal relevance should be viewed from a holistic point of view. There is one me, interacting all over, and not site or service  I have interacted with.

Relevant to me  is what will grab my attention the most and will turn my attention into an ROA ( return on attention) for my personal measuring scale. Once my relevant context (my data) is established, my attention can be bartered, treated  as an alternative currency – the economics of context – Contextonomics.

Contextonomics is the economic model for attention bartering. It means exchanging consumption of digital goods or services with attention.

To achieve a high ROA I will be willing to view offerings, communications and targeted ads based on their relevance to me. To achieve an effective ROI companies will be willing to invest in context based food chains that get them there.

In the vision of the semantic web, adding my context as a factor in the targeting and matching process changes the results, a transformation from searchability to findability, based on individual context. I can ask the world and the world will answer – but will it answer me in my particular colors, language and frame of mind. Providers will have to negotiate with me, or my avatars, based on my context.

 New food chains can be built around that ROA-ROI equilibrium. The traditional foundation of transactions will be reversed. Rather than a vendor negotiating with a cloud of users, it will be anchored in a pull model, where the user negotiates with a cloud of vendors for  similar offerings and a variety of  paying methods, in hard currency or attention equivalents.

From the economic sense of relevance based transactions, a pull based user relevant food chain, it means that each transaction executed, can be monetized in full and paid directly or traded, fully or partially, for alternative service. Providers will have automated context based offerings and banks of advertising, ads will be pulled and the advertiser rewarded for each ad sent in a pull model to a viewer. One consumer, one movie to watch for 50% discount + 3 ads that may targeted to interests and lifestyle, or one movie to watch full price = same value, but not necessarily same interest.  Yet, choice, value and preferences are individual.

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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 In an icentered digital world I want to experience the web from a holistic point of view that dynamically revolves around me.

In the current paradigm there are still barriers that prevent such an evolution.

1. Providers want to continue and cultivate a siloed digital landscape through proprietary applications that aim to keep me captive in their sites. It is in their interest to keep a strong hold on my accumulated data and not allow its portability. I have an elaborate profile at Amazon and greatly enjoy the refined Amazon recommendation engine. It is based on collaborative filtering that matches my affinities, as expressed in my past purchases and interests> Yet,  Amazon will make sure that, although my data are mine, I will not enjoy any of that, once I choose to shop at Barnes and Nobles.  My interest is to transcend the golden cage of user stickiness and expand to open ended contextification.
2. I still have disjoint profiles and identities. Current profile fragmentation is due to the fact that there is no global contextification architecture that can serve as a universal reference base.
3.  In various social networks and applications, different tools, choices and varied points of interest   create complex interactions. Infrastructures, applications and partial harmonization tools for user side interactions are emerging; interactions are becoming more complex and turned within the sites into interactive activity and conversation points. As a result, in many sites I can express my views and affinities through like, follow, comment, recommend and share with friends buttons, research on-site through comparative shopping links …. But all that does not yield an inclusive harmonious prism that I can capitalize on elsewhere.

3.      Blurring of boundaries – where the ecommerce world infiltrates  into our social platforms , our social spheres are used as social graphs for marketing purposes, and up to the unilateral attitude of transporting commercial arenas to new social platforms– as is the case with social marketing.  Even when social businesses attempt to take a human touch, as Brian Solis points, not all marketers are necessarily intent on a real dialog – where they listen and accommodate as part of a genuine customer service – to which social platforms naturally lend themselves, but rather see us as social consumers targetable in a one way marketing push channel.  

 Another  example of blurring of boundaries,  when  social spheres become social sales and marketing broadcast platforms, is Facebook marketing, where a social communication platform set for individuals becomes a home and sales arena for retail brands.  When Facebook expands  from its original  social communication and social identity hub and aspires to become my home page that’s one thing, but when it  also becomes a marketing and sales arena,  its original mission statement Facebook’s mission is to give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected no longer  reflects that user side affinity. As its business model  does not derive directly from its users, Facebook’s loyalty, doubtful to begin with, becomes all the more problematic, due to the nature of such a model. So, while  I want portability that will serve me wherever I go, Facebook wants to have it all through its portal. While  to me it does not have to spell that Facebook will turn into my department store, to Facebook, on the other hand, it is yet another building block on the way to attempting and “owning” me on the web.

In fact the movements made in this direction transfer the hegemony power struggles to yet another frontier –the anchor for web based interactions –  it generates a new war between the Facebooks and Googles around owning the biggest chunk of my digital sum total through their platforms. They woo me to  embrace them as my major interaction portal, by adding an integrated intuitive  communication platform  ( Facebook) or social ingredients to search (Google)  Their alterior motive is to facilitate collecting, storing and using my data, as profit making mechanisms.  None are trully committed to protect my privacy and would love to come with more creative ways to manipulate my data for their benefit.

So whoever wins – I still stand to lose.   

Such  solutions do not satisfy my holistic aspiration of an icentered web experience, because although the business models of these companies stem directly from me, they depend on 3^rd parties and therefore do not necessarily cater for my needs as a prime consideration. Hence I have every reason to apprehend that I may be manipulated as a tool in the profit making mechanisms -my privacy is breached, my data  may be shared without my knowledge and certainly without my consent.

As I aspire for a harmonious, inclusive and dynamic experience, I wish to have the following:

• I want that my future relations with providers be based on liberal and open ended attitudes that foster a free flow and relinquish control. A different culture does not spell loss – it challenges existing paradigms but cultivates free choices based on satisfying connectedness instead of provider based authority.
• Portability – I wish to be able to experience portability of my personal identity, profile and my social sphere between the various providers and social networks that I visit. Too few companies develop or offer open social plug -ins that empower that.
• I want sites to interconnect so my opted portability is made seamless and intuitive
• I want my experiences, choices and awarding options to my friends to share or give, at the tip of my finger, from wherever I am, with whoever I want and around relevant issues.
• I want to have the tools and means to do that and personally calibrate what suits me best.
• I want my data to reside at my side and manage my sharing with providers and friends
• I want companies to empower me, not dictate to me or exploit my data without considering me as direct partners in the food chains created around me.

Harmonization is on its way – but the buttered side of the bread is still reversed.

Only when the bread around my data will be buttered on my side and be shared by me with providers, marketers and advertisers in food chains that see me as a partner to the process – I will truly become the real customer for new platforms that are built for me – and not my data as their anchor point.

I don’t care whether the web is dead or the internet is alive – as long as I get from it what suits me best.

Chris Anderson claims, in a very controversial article, that  that The web is dead, long live the internet.

You wake up and check your email on your bedside iPad — that’s one app. During breakfast you browse Facebook, Twitter, and The New York Times — three more apps. On the way to the office, you listen to a podcast on your smartphone. Another app. At work, you scroll through RSS feeds in a reader and have Skype and IM conversations. More apps. At the end of the day, you come home, make dinner while listening to Pandora, play some games on Xbox Live, and watch a movie on Netflix’s streaming service.

You’ve spent the day on the Internet — but not on the Web.

THE WEB IS NOTHING WITHOUT ITS USERS.

An  infrastructure,  an array of apps – once it is commoditized, it is hardly the issue anymore.

From a task oriented, information and communications points of view, the web is a utility, like an electricity grid. Supplied through solar energy or through other kinds of plant – important environmentally or economically – but its very existence taken for granted, and from here on the only issue for me, the user, is what do I use it for.

The  web’s ubiquity has become a given, the application economy is flourishing and now it’s getting closer to the users and their dominant place as the anchors of web based systems.

The mobile web brings the web closer to me, wherever I am. The social web harnessesmy social sphere for sharing,  building a trust base and leveraging marketing, communication, commerce and information seeking.

The next stage is concentrating not just on interaction between users as leverages on the web economy, but on the individual itself, as an Itom in a people’s grid. Putting the user at the center will empower a new dimension to the web.

From such a user centered point of view, the only real issue for me within the web’s amplitude of offerings, is personal relevance.

The web will evolve to truly serve people individually.

The semantic web will revolutionize use of browsers, applications and web based sociality to evolve around individuals’ contextified experiences, interests and activities. It will be about the attention economy – personal relevance to personal user, optimization of applicability to suit their dynamic interests, activities and automatically serve their fluctuating needs.

The missing link is contextification syatems that perceive the individual as a whole, contextifiy  her experience,and create an attention economy based on context as a measuring scale for services, transactions and degree of relevance.  

 The web is not dead – it is evolving towards its ultimate goal – a people’s web – a web that will eventually become  what is destined to be –  an Icentered  web of life, for each of us, individually – the web according to me.

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 .

I was recently asked about the icentered view on trust, so I am summarizing the Icentered view on trust, privacy and new  web ecology.

Icentered means the individual user is at the center, with the wheel in her hands,  a personal vantage point on a web that is personalized, trusted, contextualized, private and safe –  a truly user centered web.

 It’s a reversal of trust empowering mechanisms – Instead of providers asking us to take a leap of faith in their protection of our privacy and data management, and claims of preserving an ethical code and transparency as trust building mechanisms, Icentered will look at trust from different aspects, as a new mindset, a new web paradigm.

The prevailing paradigm driving web interactions today is based on a silo approach where the context of sites, providers, and platforms… is the key. Users are required to adapt to the provided scheme. Site centered leaves users no options. They depend on one-sided privacy and trust management policies of providers, can choose to agree to these policies, and enter the site – or decline and go away. Most trust related discussions are centered on how best to protect consumer privacy while supporting information sharing and relevance enhancement.

 The basic questions at the heart of trusting site centered paradigms are:

•  Do I trust them? Am I relieved with privacy assurances provided by the sites with which I interact
• Do they abuse this trust?
• Do I have any means to check?
• Do I really know what knowledge they accumulate about me?
• Is the bargain of sharing information for receiving targeted offers or expose information for free services a bargain from hell?
• Am I in any real position to verify that the privacy policy stated is actually preserved?
• Do they save records?…Track movements?…Follow my activities?
• What security measures can I take?
• How paranoid should I be?

 Shouldn’t I at least be in a position to proactively manage my privacy and trust relationships? It is my data, my privacy!

 From an Icentered view, I am no longer the “user” as defined by web site owners and digital merchants. In all three spheres of interaction (people, content and services), there is one holistic harmonious “me” interacting with all of “them”. It is me driving all such interactions, in my context, from my point of view, under my control and my direct proactive management

The essence of the Icentered trust and privacy paradigm is that I, the user, am with the wheel in my hand and I master the process. My data will be kept at my end and not within the walled servers of the providers. I will expose/ share/hide as much as suits me personally. There is no need to pay 3rd party companies to monitor me, invade my social graph and provide tools to lure me.

 Contextualization infrastructure, cloud computing, user side filtering mechanisms, proactive privacy and trust management solutions that reside locally for each user, completely visible to her, and under her full control,  will empower a true Icentered web and create new trust based transparent food chains,  taking into account and rewarding all the willing participants in the food chains.

The reversed trust management has context  as the reference base of all explicit and implicit targeting efforts. To empower that a context based measuring scale is needed, that will become an open tool of the trade for enabling trusted context based offerings. Once our data are distributed, harmonized around contextual strings, trusted user centered services (contextual equivalent to Visa for money) can manage user context based transactions that reward all the participants in the food chains and still create a transparent, trustworthy web ecology.