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and praises individuality as a stand point for interactions with people with a cynical reference to normality, as an outdated lens for definitions and processes.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.

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.

User centricity is a universal approach that takes a holistic systemic view of  the place of the individual in it. As the web’s ubiquity becomes a given and an increasingly growing part of our interactions is web based, the issue of user centricity takes a more significant meaning. User centricity can no longer be seen as just a design principle, but the other way around, especially as user centricity and trust, an essential element in 21^st century web and business culture, go hand in hand.

User centered semantics comprise of multidisciplinary approaches – philosophical, social, economic principles and a fundamental set of values and concepts that assume:

• Open ended systems, interoperability protocols, design premises.
• User control over data, privacy, identity management…
• User controlled data portability
• Transparency
• Users own conversations, interactions, privacy and sharing
• Simple, intuitive usage design and inclusive user experiences for the weaker digital populations.

Once the user is truly at the center, user centricity requires balancing the interests of all parties involved, users, providers, institutions, architecture designers through a cooperative discourse that looks at all as equal partners and respects the rights and interests of all, through transparent mechanisms that enhance trust.

In web based systems, these values and premises can then be translated to define design principles of enabling and supporting technologies, platforms, architectures and business processes that empower user centered interoperability between users, providers, institutions, governance, communities and content creators.

User centricity in existing paradigms does not go hand in hand with top down siloed approaches that claim to be focused on the user, but confuse users with consumers from a corporate/institutional point of view. It is due to hegemony wars and business dominance of corporates and service providers, that do all they can to cultivate approaches that put constraints on customers’ disengagement, as they try to keep their customers captive for corporate profit building plans. It is in complete contradiction to the open, free and transparent spirit and culture of the web and of us, its users.

User centricity is not just about commercial offerings. It is about users’ control over their data, transparency mechanisms that are based on the principles of free choice, portability, simple and free disengagement…..

Whereas user centered takes a systemic view of user centered systems and scenarios, Icentered takes a prismatic view of the individual as the hard core nucleus of any user centered system. It represents the individual in the conceptualization of a user centered blueprint. How the world, interactions and relations should be seen through this lens, once the user is really at the center, with the reins of control in her hands.

The I in icentered focuses on the individuality of each user, as an Itom, the granular entity of the icentered world. An Itom is the smallest comprehensive unit that describes me, the individual user, as a whole, as a unique individual, through all my interactions, across all sites, platforms and media. Each and every one of us is an individual, unique, distinct, non divisible Itom.

Looking at the digital world through a prismatic view of each individual Itom , creates a new vantage point for web based relations. Once we look at it as a people’s web,  it’s an “I in the center” paradigm, where  each user becomes a distinct anchor,  an Itom. The systemic concepts and blueprints that will empower this vision of the web,  are at the heart of user centricity paradigms.

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.    

.

A bunch of guys at Google had a wonderful idea. Let’s create a series of videos that will help our parents to use the web. They  launched a site that empowers people to teach their grown up parents how to use the web. It is a great step in helping older people to overcome their technophobia.

Age related digital divide is one of the things that makes older people, and even late boomers, feel inadequate. What seems to many elementary, creates a paralyzing situation for elders at the most fundamental web based usage situations. Managing on their own, through a simplified adapted process of guidance that does not embarrass them in front of their children and grandchildren, not only answers their need to know, but provides a handle  to confront the issue on their own, at their pace, without being pressured by their slow and hesitant learning curve. Knowing that those guides are there, always at reach and they can revisit if they forget, makes seniors confident. Mastering things that to digital natives is intuitive, gives older people a sense of belonging and a feeling of being included in the digital society.

The joy of a grandmother that can press the Like button,  be updated on her grandchildren’s status through Facebook, find her way through Google, chat on Skype and send emails, is not to be taken for granted.

Giving these tools to teach the elderly is a great service to both children and parents.

On the functional level the videos, a spontaneous amateur production,  are not fully adapted to the needs and pace of the older population. The screenshots are blurred, not everybody has a Mac and the young presenters’ talk is not always coherent, yet –  it’s a grassroot initiative and an admirable one. Chapeau for their resourcefulness, awareness to the importance of enhancing the mature population to be more digitally savvy in an a simplistic and intuitive way and contribution to a softer digital based bonding between generations.

And on the same level, an equally admirable initiative at Google is a beautiful book that teaches young children about the internet – 20 things I learnt about browsers and the web. An elementary readers’ digest about the web, TCPIP, cookies, HTML, cloud computing….  I am sure much older children will be equally happy to learn about the what and why around the web and not just take its existence for granted.

These two initiatives, borne from an inclusive attitude,  connect the dots for digital immigrants and digital newbies.  This contribution to  facilitate, familiarize and bond  young and old to what is increasingly growing to become a natural part of our life fabric,  is another step in adapting our web to make it a real web of life.

Disclaimer: I am also a  partner at Senior-Touch, a company that focuses on bringing 3^rd age needs and usability into the process of developing products, services and bridging age related digital divide.

 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.

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

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

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

All courtesy of Facebook.

How efficient.

How comforting.

How tempting.

How frightening!

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

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

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

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

What a bear hug!

Can we afford it? Is it worth the price?

There ’s no free meal.

Beware.

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

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

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

A war over enlarging user based virtual territories.

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

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

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

Where will it evolve?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And still it is not enough.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Two recent apology based ads – by Nike and Toyota, try to reinstitute reliability and trust as part of a crisis management policy through very unique measures.

The magnitude of the issue is highlighted as for the first time transparency and trust outweigh product quality in corporate identity in the 2010 Edelman trust barometer.

 Two important findings in the latest trust survey – in western countries trust and transparency in business influence corporate identity more than product quality. Trust in business has risen from 53% to 83%, while trust in media has fallen from 48% to 45%. Expert spokespeople and information sources are more trustworthy than messages through traditional media.

After a decade of recession, fraud, customers’ manipulations, repetitive breaches of privacy and trust, these numbers indicate a fundamental change to interactions between consumers and providers.

The new consumer is following trust agents of her choice to relate to a brand’s trustworthiness  and reliability, therefore brands must use completely new forms of dialogs to gain  credibility;  all the more so in trust related crisis management situations.

Whereas in the digital world, building or abusing trust is facilitated by technologies and infrastructures, it is interesting to revert to the world of traditional goods and see this tendency as an indicator to a new kind of dialog initiated by companies whose trust and credibility barometers have dramatically sunk.

 Tiger Woods is a golf brand. Nike is a mega brand. In the first Tiger Woods ad produced by Nike after the Woods infidelity scandal, Earl Woods, Tiger’s dead father’s voice is scolding him, while the ashamed Tiger Woods just stands there, listens to the questions poured,  and doesn’t say a word.

The simplicity of a black and white ad featuring Tiger Woods wearing a Nike outfit, listening to his own father, should invoke a feeling of authentic remorse.  Did you learn anything? What your feeling was? Asked the reworking of the father’s voice. But the scolded son does not utter a sound. Very powerful. You may like or dislike – but you can’t ignore the extreme effort, personal touch and powerful messages that were put into play.

Yet it raises questions that go beyond the reinstitution campaign of a fallen icon.

Tiger Woods is a business. A huge endorsement business that directly affects the companies who chose him. His personal acts cost him endorsement contracts with companies like Gillette, AT&T, Accenture and Gatorade that distanced themselves from him, while Nike, one of his major  endorsing companies, stood by him.   

Should a commercial company  spear head the public “mea culpa” guilt driven star’s attempts to make amends? At the end of the day it’s about $ – lots of $. Tiger Woods is an industry. Nike’s standing behind its presenter during the crisis and their support of his comeback campaign, carry a very strong marketing statement.  

Is an invocation of a dead father’s voice to scold a strayed son’s personal life an authentic trustworthy brand loyalty reinstitutioner? How questionable is the authenticity of past speeches of a dead person, enhanced by technological manipulations of voice recordings, in reframing an image?

What makes our trust? To what extent is a personal rehabilitation campaign sponsored and initiated by a commercial company trustworthy? Is it legitimate to work domestic issues with a dead father, who did not choose  or approve his participation in this appearance, to enhance a commercial corporate?

Was it made to move us to re-embrace the Tiger Woods image with whom we do not directly interact, or is it a means to feed on the corporate identity and Nike brand?    

What are the real relations between such a Nike produced ad and Tiger Woods’ redemption to commercial glory, now he is back to playing professional golf?

Do we buy it? Does it really matter? Do we hate it, resent the manipulation – but still talk about it and thus pave the way to what may seem the most extreme remorse.

Would this really enhance our loyalty to Nike, Gillette or any other brand Tiger Woods was endorsing at the time?

 Another kind of apology advertising has been recently launched by Toyota. In the following  commitment ad,  Toyota tries to restore faith in their company, after the millions of cars recall,  and promises to live up to its customers’ expectations for quality and safety.

This is a different ball game. It is no longer about sports shoes or shaving cream, it’s about quality, life endangering safety faults and a direct damage to the brand itself.  Millions of cars’ recall for safety hazards are not like indirect projections on a consumers’ brands’ image  due to an endorser’s fall.

Admitting directly we have messed up, harnessing all the workers as committed to amend and restore your faith in us, is a very straightforward act of owning the mistake and committing to do what is needed. This commitment ad, together with an open letter in the Washington Post  from Toyota’s president that enhances the  commitment ad, are very brave direct  steps to reinstitute credibility, trust in the company and brand reliability.

  No doubt the impact on consumer in an icon’s commitment to marital fidelity is a lot less endangering than the commitment to absolute future car safety. In either case it’s an indicator of a zeitgeist that cherishes transparency, trust and credibility  – where companies must go to great length to show how meaningful they are in their declarations and marketing communication in order to regain trust.