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.

In a user centered trust based culture, respecting users’ freedom, choices, set of values and their need for trust through transparent information, will bring a new spring to the dynamic power balance  in the relations between providers and users.

As we increasingly turn from citizens to engaged consumers of information, services and goods in many systems we interact with, providers need to become more attentive to the growing user centered culture. Once fighting over our attention is not enough – humility is called for: fighting over our trust demands adapting to the growing zeitgeist of more humane soft values: transparency, relinquishing control, accepting our state of mind and adapting to it.

Recent amendments to the Consumer Bill of Rights, originally articulated by Kennedy in 1960, suggested lately, reflect the shift and scope enlargement of consumers’ place in the food chains.  The growing user centered dignity emphasizes what consumers’ consciousness puts at center stage:

“to be protected against fraudulent, deceitful, or misleading information, advertising, labeling, or other practices, and to be given, by all goods and service providers, unrestricted access to the complete information needed to make an informed choice, including but not limited to ingredients, materials, origin, labor conditions, life cycle, and political activity.”

The original consumer bill of rights treated the basic consumers’

• The right to safety: to be protected against the marketing of products and services that are hazardous to health or to life.
• The right to be informed: to be protected against fraudulent, deceitful, or grossly misleading information, advertising, labeling, or other practices, and to be given the facts needed to make informed choices.
• The right to choose: to have available a variety of products and services at competitive prices.
• The right to be heard: to be assured that consumer interests will receive full and sympathetic consideration in making government policy, both through the laws passed by legislatures and through regulations passed by administrative bodies.
• The right to education: to have access to programs and information that help consumers make better marketplace decisions.
• The right to redress: to work with established mechanisms to have problems corrected and to receive compensation for poor service or for products which do not function properly.
• The right to service–the right to privacy, courtesy, and responsiveness to consumer problems and needs and all steps necessary to ensure that products and services meet the quality and performance levels claimed for them (Added by Clinton, 1994).

Many of these things seem obvious today, although the recent amendments reflect, more than anything else, the spirit of users’ consciousness, based not only on awareness of the quality of goods and services consumed, but to what they stand for, our understanding that manufacturing conditions  of goods and our judgment of  corporate identity of the provider.

We expect from our providers engagement that exceeds CRM discourse and corporate oriented revenue making policies. We expect transparency and a more humanizing culture. Therefore this bill goes as far as the political intricacies that corporates employ – such is the level of consumer scrutiny of their providers.

As we, users, increasingly see ourselves as equal partners in the process and are aware of our power, the shifting balance calls for a new level of ecology, for paradigm change that will flow with the openness, freedom and central place, that we, conscious consumers, have today.

Providers that will accept the evolution of consumerism, sign this bill and adapt to its spirit, will prevail in the shifting user centered paradigm.

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.

The user centered approach, that puts individuals at the center with active control over their data and privacy and calls for a paradigm change in relations with providers, institutions and content creators, is beginning to mushroom through preliminary initiatives and writings.

The following is a partial list I have accumulated.

Initiatives around user centered proactive data management

• Project VRM – VRM stands for Vendor Relationship Management. It’s a reversed, pull based paradigm that presents the other side of CRM (customer relationship management) and provides customers with independence from closed siloed vendors’ golden cages.
• Personal.com – User side data sharing management initiative
• Personal data store  and Mydex personal data store – a personal data center about individuals for interactions with institutions through common data models to be shared and viewed permission based.
• The Mine! Project – The Mine! Project is about equipping people with tools and functionality that will help them to take charge of their data, arrange it according to their needs and preferences and share it on their own terms.
• The internet identity workgroup  is a practical idealism in working towards the shared vision of a decentralized, user-oriented identity layer for the Internet
• The personal data ecosystem supports businesses supporting user’s need to control, manage, and direct the way they want to share and allows for the emergence of new data markets and services
• NET EUCEN – network of European Stakeholders for enhancing user centricity in eGovernance

These initiatives, together with groups that work on identity management, will create a nucleus for a blueprint of systems that will truly put individuals at the center and will facilitate user centered control over individual data, privacy, choices and sharing.

Books

Pull: The power of the semantic web to transform your business – David Siegel

The power of pull: How smart moves, smartly made, can set big things in motions – John Hagel III and John Sealy Brown

A video: The data locker vision – by David Siegel.

 A video describing a future scenario of a  fantastic  user centered, personalized, contextualized reality  of daily life with  a personal data locker vision by David Siegel. This is what an icentered ecosystem will look like, when all platforms, technologies, contextualization tools and practices will mature, interoperate and personally align  around each individual.

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.

Why wasn’t I consulted?

   For Paul Ford it is the fundamental question of the web that distinguishes it from any other medium, since  the web is a customer service medium and people like to exercise their power and knowledge. WWIC (why wasn’t I consulted) translates to free web initiatives. Paul Ford scales the evolution of the expression by the level of interactivity and intuitive ease of expressiveness. Phase I – interactive, open to comments, talkbacks, phase 2 – Liked, shared, socially evaluated and appreciated, phase 3 – user initiative sites that let us, users, upload our content, fully debate our views- all that empowers full participation. As long as you consider service providing as a conversation, WWIC web empowers users to own the conversation.

Yet, this observation still stems from e a reactive frame.  It evaluates evolutionary boundaries of traditional paradigms, based on of top down defined relations, where corporates own the game but attentively empower customers’ conversations. More advanced ones still own the game but reframe the discourse and adopt a socially involved more humane corporate identity,  follow their customers and reach out to them in their social spheres, indeed a customer service medium.

To us this is our web, not a customer service medium.

 We invented the web to happen to ourselves, not to create content.  

As such, we should own the web, not just the conversation.

Each one of us is an individual with a defined mark . We’re Itoms in a people’s grid, what we want, how we handle it and what we control is defined individually. This cannot be endowed. It should be naturally ours.

The defining question of the web is who controls it. The answer to Who controls the web  requires a different mindset. A proactive mindset that puts the user at the center, with the wheel in her hands and full control over the relationship.

 For us, the web’s native users, the fundamental rule is to control it. For that end, new paradigms are required  An icentered state of mind spells user ownership and control over data, privacy, sharing, a new pact of relations, based on pull models,  freedom from captivity in siloed sites, from being manipulated as part of hegemony wars over web dominance.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Two main components are still missing. Context and control.

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

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

And that’s my real capital.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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A Wahington Post story  The Bloggess and the Christmas Gift Card Miracle of 2010 tells about  Jenny Lawson  who offered in her blog 30 Christmas gift cards for people in need who would tell her why it would make a difference in their lives. She never dreamed it would turn into a flood of people telling the hardships and circumstances of why they can’t buy their children a gift for Christmas and an overpour of people asking to give. From a small gesture she found herself sleepless over the whole weekend managing spreadsheets of candidates and donors,  resulting in hundreds of grateful families on both ends and committing to turning it into a tradition.

This is the humanizing web fabric of empowering a digital expression of  the human touch, that no computer, machine or sophisticated software will ever be able to provide. The power of the story lies in its smallness, simplicity and spontaneity. Through the heart, not through the brain. Not taking part in a large scale campaign for helping people to make their way out of poverty, not donating to organizations or participating in micro lending initiatives that give people tools to embetter their lives. Straight. Small. From one person to another.  A spontaneous, instant, bottom up market place that innocently sprung up to directly  connect those who reach out and those that want to hug. Remember the Free Hugs campaign that started from the need of one man for a hug, and turned into a world wide phenomenon? Just a hug!  

Once the web exceeds its functionality as a communication platform, information or commerce arenas and organically grows, bottom up, into personifying human reaching out – from one person to another, reading a story, being touched, because it immediately strikes a chord – be it personal childhood memories of being on the struggling end, gratefulness for being blessed and able to make others happy. This  spontaneous person to person reaching out  to make a difference, crowdsourcing to make someone happy with a small donation,  and vouching to do so again, is what truly makes the web our own.

The humanizing power of our web, one touching gesture instantly turns into a grassroots  endeavor that gets a life of its own as an organic Christmas hug is what makes the web a real web of life – for people, from people, by people – a grid of dots that spontaneously connect to make strong lines from heart to heart.

 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.

Mydex,  a community interest company, has just launched in the UK a personal data store,  a user side personal information management service where individuals can keep a universal user-centered account of their personal information – records of their personal data, purchases, credit, health, insurance, home related information so they can track it as needed.

The service is currently on trials with the U.K. Department for Work and Pensions, and three local councils; London Borough of Brent, London Borough of Croydon, Royal Borough of Windsor and Maidenhead. They present it as a free market solution to a privacy management issue  by reversing the paradigm of  the private information that companies and governments store about us, where the individual  builds a personal data store and empowers, at will,  companies and governments to access, after signing an agreement.

Additionally, organizations, government and providers  can find and share information regarding individuals, but in a reversed balance scale – they have to approach individuals, sign an agreement.

A white paper explores in depth what is the concept of the personal data store.

Alan Mitchell and  William Heath are the people heading  this initiative.

It is a very interesting early-bird attempt to explore aspects of empowering a user-centered approach and shifting power to users, by giving them control over their data. This project deals with hard core personal functional  documents that we need to share with institutions in the functional areas.

 This trial does not touch at all, at least at this stage, the very complex issue of monitoring personal data in our web based communications, searches for contextual exploitation by marketers for relevant ads and offerings, and touches only partially on commercial activities, it is very valuable as it makes several important statements in regard to personal information empowerment:

• It shows that institutions can agree to the reversal of balance and that it can be implemented in providers’ culture. Commercial institutions will follow the steps of organizations in order to become part of the emerging ecosystems.

• A good example of  running trust based user side intermediary services for data management. It should definitely not be run  by a corporate whose business model relies on income from  3^rd party ( advertising) but should be based on direct user based business models, like a bank.
• It is a building block towards a new mindset for a reversal of power between providers and users. It will open people and organizations to realize that traditional corporate based paradigms will have to gradually adjust to user centered initiatives that will require a new kind of dialog between providers and users.
• The new paradigm that sees the individual at the center where providers negotiate directly with the user permission to pull from the users’ side information and reward it accordingly will open up new business models around personal data usage in a permission based, mutual reward.

• The efficiency demonstrated in such a trial in cost savings for multiple data saving schemes may eventually enhance corporates’ realization that the huge sums they invest in building client data bases in their siloed companies, can be replaced  by a coopetition model where, even if they have to relinquish power, still – all parties will gain.

I hope that together with initiatives like the project VRM - a vendor relationship managemnet intiative, will serve as catalysts to build a mindshare towards a user centered web.