Personal, a start-up company, offers to empower each of us to manage our digital data, share at will and get compensated when companies capitalize on our data, Personal’s service is a personal data bank, that keeps your assets for you in a friendly and intuitive way, facilitates permission based sharing and may trade with them in your name.

It is an early example of user side personal data management services. This personal information vault may be seen as the equivalent of a bank vault combined with an account management and services platform. It is based on a simple assumption that personal data should be managed and shared user side, as a form of currency.

Why is it necessary? In a ubiquitous world where personal cloud services will become natural, always-on assumes accessibility to my personal digital materials. There are already file hosting cloud based services like Dropbox, that allow instant accessibility and intuitive sharing to all files saved through the service as they are  also instantly saved to all computers, phones, and the Dropbox website.

Personal takes this notion a step further to create intuitive topic/functionality based data gems, modular data  capsules that address specific information, topics and needs. This icon based personal digital filing system around personal data and functional information – such as insurance information, appliances’ specifications, pets’ regime, registrations….. over a 100 data gems filed under icon based digital files,  empower users’ intuitive access to functional data and information in a pin pointed manner, easily shared per need.

The value of these data gems starts with the user experience. Yes, we all have files and folders that we build according to our logic and personal tagging. Data gems facilitate organizing and managing users’ practical information and data by objectifying data units and wrapping them in a universal symbol capsule system. The user oriented conceptualization, functionality though an icon based  universal symbolic language, makes the experience simplified, flowing and personal.  The visual user friendly iconography frees users from individually reconstructing where the needed information resides, under what tags it was filed. This intuitive usability approach and detailed lego-like granularity, facilitates bridging digital divides by accommodating people that are not digitally intuitive to information handling, filing and sharing , and facilitates accessibility to that information if someone trusted needs to quickly find some functional data.

Icentered envisions a future of user controlled personal data management, that will replace the need to trust providers and rely on their privacy policies. This user side data management paradigm will empower Contextonomics –  a user side trading with personal contextual information, rewarding users as equal partners in the food chains for their data tracking and as means for  attention bartering.

The topic of users’ data ownership and  privacy control is controversial. I believe that once users side platforms and personal data management services like Personal will empower users to store, manage and share their personal data with other people,  advertisers and providers, user based contextonomics models will start to replace the traditional corporate based business models, an important stage towards a user centric digital economy.

From an Icentered point of view – my data, social network and my privacy and sharing preferences are mine to manage and use as I see fit. 2 new initiatives take this approach to different and opposing extremes.

Empire Avenue is a social media exchange platform game, where you buy and sell shares of people and of websites online through a stock market simulation. The game includes social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, Flicker, YouTube, and the player’s own blog and RSS feeds.

Empire Avenue creates players’ portfolio in a virtual economy setting, like Monopoly on people, by driving their social media activity in the real world.  Players choose their own ticker symbol, the price of a player’s share depends on the ticker’s stock buying and selling, based  on  social networking activity. They can conduct share like activities such as multiple investors, invest in other players, gain dividends from the other shares in players they invest in, and can win Achievements for their actions, such as advertising and adding services such as Twitter.

The game intertwines real world and play world, because real life social activity of  play members , such as their social graph, RSS feeds and blogs, increases their game value which, in turn, is translated to dividends.

The game uses a virtual currency, Eaves, as a way to purchase shares in other players, that can either be people in your social network, or brands and companies that have social media accounts on Facebook – which turns it into a social marketing and mind share building tool for marketers.

Selling your Facebook friends and Twitter followers takes Empire Avenue to the most open social approach to a user’s own data, that by participating in the game, openly consents to trade with her social graph and be traded.

It can be viewed as a ranking system for social graphs, that builds evangelism, influencing and follower charts mechanisms that are the bread and butter of community dynamics. The data extracted from this social game draw profiles of influencers, leaders and initiators that can in turn become valuable in communities of interest.

User centricity takes an interesting open approach in Empire Avenue, as the thin line between reality and game is blurred in this game, once a player willingly becomes a part of a universal value index.

Can people’s stock like ranking have influence in their real life endeavors? Will players act socially online to increase their social worth and encourage others to invest in them? Will they be valued differently in the real world socially, in the job market? Is it good? Threatening? Exploitative? That’s very personal. However, just like in Second Life, the virtual world game, simulating and capitalizing on real world phenomena and rankings with virtual currency, to create a virtual world is very controversial. Only Empire Avenue blurs the borders even further and builds currency around real world people and their real data – it can serve from commercial interests and up to new circles of networking based on common denominators with people not originally in your social sphere, based on pointers and asset building of co-players.

Flink12 is the complete opposite. It’s a real life social network that brings back the authentic personalized touch to social networks by offering limited personalized networks of up to 12 friends in a circle, and empowers sharing of chats, photos and personally segregated blogs around topics and opinions. The approach of  up to 12 people in a social circle around a shared interest, with an option to have the same person in several Flinks around different prisms of sharing.  It takes a user centered control over the user’s social graph to a very private extreme, creating very small personal social spheres and making sure that those graphs are not indexed in the web in any search engine. Flink 12 is named after 12 cows that compose a flink.

It is a more relevance based networking way that brings intimacy back to private sharing of social online life. The small sharing in confined groups touches upon the fact that in the big social networks your list of friends does not really represent your human scale of personal relations. When you want to intimately share with a group of people around topics and experiences and don’t want to make it into public exposures – you can control the real sharing of personal information with just the people you want and actively control privacy and sharing considerations intuitively, easily.

Flink12 humanizes back the social online experience. In a social network era where one has hundreds of friends, personal touch is lost and we are all targeted by search engines and marketers, Flink12 brings back a personal touch of creating authentic first circle of really closed friends/family members/peers/co-workers around topics to shares humanifies back our social sphere to what it should have been – a really personal circle of communications.

By creating very private socializing maps that simulate more authentically our real- life personal socializing, as we don’t befriend 400 Facebook registered friends in a go and intuitively monitor what we share with whom.   It empowers intuitive sharing by natural social groups such as close family, close friends/co-workers and allows the online instant spontaneity while keeping privacy, user control and personal segregation preferences.

These two extreme new evolutions of social spheres online strengthens the 2 sides of what experiences should be like – ubiquitous infrastructures and accessibility, on top of which on top of which user controlled segmented interwebs offer varied
interaction option for each one personally - another step towards a truly user centric web.

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.

Scott Adams envisions Futureme, a future plans based personal network that sees my intended plans and wishes as currency.

 Right now, you can’t get there from here.

How much is my privacy worth?  my data? 

My data have a predictive value for providers and advertisers.

Once they know what I was interested in, they should know what to offer me next.

To me it spells relevance = attention enhancement

To them it spells personalization – matching offering with customer need= offering enhancement.

They are willing to pay to know my relevance scale. Of my past activities. So they can assess future potential.

Who owns the process?

To date, we, users, may own the conversation of what we want next, but providers own the data manipulation process.

Of our data!

We, users, fight for keeping our privacy. Our privacy has an economic value. What is it? How can it be quantified?

Today it is non tangible to us. We give parts of our privacy away for nothing, and most of the time, we don’t even know it. Other parts are captive in siloed sites of providers and although the data are ours, we can’t reach it, let alone use it elsewhere.

Our future interests also hold capital value. Sales potential.

Scott Adams describes a personal, future based social network, Futureme. He calls it a Facebook killer, and differentiates between them based on a time line – Facebook is about my past – Futureme – about my future. It will be  built around my future interests, where people I choose can become part of a specific social graph for a specific interaction. So can providers and advertisers.

That adds 2 dimensions to the value of my data. My personal data as displayed for a future intention that has value to providers and my social capital that has value, placing me as an anchor in a  social ecosystem built around my future interest.

I don’t know if secluded future based marketplaces are the answer, but that is definitely a clear example of how my context becomes a currency. That can be bartered with direct $ value, or with attention to targeted ads.. I call that  Contextonomics. 

You may argue with the spectrum of his call for open sharing, that’s very personal and should be calibrated by each and every one according to the event, social graph and elements involved.

This vision is of a user centered long tail, based on pull, rather than push. User controlled. Direct inclusion of the user in the food chain is in sync with the icentered mindset.

Buyer centered paradigms  will force providers to embrace an organizational shift, where putting the customer first becomes more than a marketing lip service and all the systems will have to be aligned to provide that shift to pull based marketing.

Once contextonomics allows a bartering system and user centered marketplaces are up, we, users, will then own the process, will be treated as a source of revenue and will get our rightful place in the food chain.

Turning our data into capital still requires a quantum leap.  If Dilbert sees it, eventually providers will too. Such grassroots of visions and ideas of user centered ecosystems seed the path that will eventually lead to the required paradigm shift.

The battle over net neutrality and over open web as opposed to closed systems will only increase. In this struggle  the fight over the web’s  ownership and its usage patterns is a global powerful war. On its face level, the struggle can be seen as commercial struggle for  owning the principal platforms for web dominance, owning the apps’ infrastructure to ensure that whatever we use, we go through that platform namely, through closed systems that make us bend to their terms.

 In fact it’s about preserving corporate paradigms based on rigid rules of engagement, privacy policies of the old world, where top down hierarchies and policies dictate the business models and our captivity.

 It is  opposed  to open  systems that acknowledge and thrive on the cultural, consumer, social shifts and the free spirit of the web that encourages the  harnessing of  new business models to accommodate users.

The internet is etheric, ubiquitous, heterogeneous, distributed and intangible. It includes all the markets of the traditional world. And as digital takes an increasing part of our life, power struggles become more sophisticated and the fight to keep an open web takes further significance. It’s no longer about what devices we use, not even what operating system, but what culture, approach and relations we’ll have with companies that cater for our digital life.

This battle incorporates, from an icentered lens, the most threatening aspects for abuse of the free spirit, culture and mindset we want for our web life. It is a battle over our rightful place in ecosystems created around us, over our freedom of choice,  and our right to proactively manage our privacy and sharing.

We cannot be owned by providers. The battle to become our personal portal and the hegemony wars over web dominance between Google, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft are cannibalizing the basic web future and mindset it should spell for us, its users.

From a corporate perspective it’s about  transparency, data management, privacy policies and customer relations. The battle over who will have control over anything we interact with on the web.

We should be thankful for those super giants of the digital economy for empowering us with a new digital dimension that has revolutionized our lives and has made digital a commodity. At the same breath, we should fear the lack of sensitivity and respect, of those companies, who, through their offerings, define the rules of what our digital life will look like.

What awaits us in that power struggle?

Apple has revolutionized our communications consumptions, yet their closed system of Macs, Iphone,  iPads are closed gardens relying on itunes for entertainment content. Will the future spell a web built on micro apps?

Google’s search results, as our primary source of reference, dictate to a large extent how we perceive things. Will the future depend on an organized web according to Googles’ keys for inclusion?

Facebook has redefined our social connectivity, dialogs and the way we interact with each other over the web. Will it our personal operating system be dressed in Facebook’s outfit?

As the world goes mobile, smart phones will indicate the next evolutionary stages of web usage, the battle between the mobile Android based Google mobile OS and the closed Iphone systems is a micro cosmos of the battle over closed or open web. And on it goes…. 

 We are at the verge of web 3.0 that will bring with it awareness and contextification, that will make us, users, more vulnerable as computer systems will automatically analyze  our interactions with advanced semantic tools, spot our whereabouts and activities through location awareness. Add that to the downpour of information, data and media, personalization will be the name of the game – and control and privacy issues will augment with that.

The symbol of the battle between open and closed is the cultural difference between the basic approach of two of the giants fighting for hegemony – Google and Facebook.

We used to fear Google’ Big brother master plan for web dominance,  We can be mildly reassured of  Googles’ Don’t be evil motto that they have made a central pillar in their corporate identity, that their culture tends to be more open, today, and by the level of transparency that goes together with being a public company.  

Facebook opts for closure, secret and obscure policies, remaining private so not to have to embrace the transparency and accountability of a public company.  The Goldman_Sacks Facebook deal, a quasi private investment , asserts this. If  Facebook really wanted to, it could embrace an open culture, Zuckerberg preferred  not to assume that accountability.

 We must encourage privacy activists, consumer watchdogs and netizens  to foster constant awareness to the importance of open systems, transparency and user control in a free, neutral open social web.

A neutral web will ensure our security, safety, independence – as contrary to a closed web dominated by digital superpowers who constantly track us without any ability on our part to block or share at will, controls our data and dictates the economic food chains around our data.

For all these reasons, protecting us from the closing movement of the giants who want to dominate it all – calls for a paradigm shift. One that reverses relations between providers and users, is based on technologies and  an open mindset that will allow for pull based permission and data exchange context based food chains, proactively managed by users who become equal partners in the food chains created about them.

Some basic new ground rules for rearranging relations between consumers and providers must be respected. No commercial corporate, acting for its own capital gain, should own our data or have the ability to manipulate or expose it unsolicited, or arbitrarily and unilaterally dictate what additional offerings become integrated to the services and what their consequences are to us, users. They should respect our rightful place as the only owners of personal data, visibility and sole control over sharing handles.

Only then will Zuckerbergs relinquish their power, acknowledge and act with the humility and accountability that come with assuming the culture of reciprocity and respect of truly catering for individuals.

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.    

.

 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.

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.