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

How much is my privacy worth?  my data? 

My data have a predictive value for providers and advertisers.

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

To me it spells relevance = attention enhancement

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

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

Who owns the process?

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

Of our data!

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

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

Our future interests also hold capital value. Sales potential.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

THE WEB IS NOTHING WITHOUT ITS USERS.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The web will evolve to truly serve people individually.

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

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

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

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 .

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The increasing trust in business can be connected to the rising transparency and social responsibility that organizations embraced as part of their corporate identity.

In media, on the other hand, rise of social media as a targeting platform for marketers is shaking the inherent trust we have in our social sphere.  We trust our friends and peers because they are supposed to be devoid of personal gain in their recommendations – clean, transparent p2p natural flow, reciprocal in value.

I tend to share the doubts about the accuracy of the numbers in this trust barometer, and also believe that the level of trust from friends and peers depends on more complex  factors  than reflected in the ways the questions were built. At the same time there is no doubt that the rise of the value of the social web for marketers, the growing share of social marketing in the marketing mix of companies and the open revenue based  facilitation of the social platforms to allow marketing, targeting and advertising activity, shake our automatic trust.  

Once marketers tap into our social spheres, aiming to build profits and reputation for their brands, and take on a cloak of authenticity to capture our attention, we feel manipulated and recoil. When the major social networks compete on becoming targetable communication platforms, we users, lose our town square and become more suspicious.  

So, basically, although in the attention economy recommendations from friends are much more than just attention grabbers, surfing above the noise, even people from our social sphere can’t be automatically classified as trust agents in today’s reality where:

A. My social sphere (to me a trusted more intimate personal circle) is being targeted by marketers as social media to manipulate for their profits, sometimes even with explicit incentives, and other times through technological means that are not transparent to me.

B. In an era where you may have hundreds of acquaintances, formerly known as friends, in your social network (or several of them), without any distinction of the level of proximity, intimate acquaintance, or at least the framework or context of acquaintance – being on someone’s social graph doesn’t automatically turn this person into a trust agent.

Therefore I believe that the keys are context and relevance. Trust is amorphic, subjective, non tangible. It stems from a whole subjective set of attributes, values, connotations and beliefs regarding a person, a situation, a recommendation. It establishes a level of credibility to the recommending personal friends that external sources cannot assess.

The 2 folded context/relevance around an interaction is a very strong determinant for a level of trust. The context of the recommending person to me within my social graph, levels of proximity, common interaction grounds. With it comes an attitude to the relevance of the person in my social sphere to the recommendation, the product/service and how that offering might be good for me. The personal context in which these elements are related to me and the offering, enhance my trust.

Context empowers  trust, enhances it by creating a relevance based degree of connectedness that exterior marketers cannot be aware of. 

The economics of the social web enable marketers to exploit our social sphere for their marketing purposes. Transparency is doubtful, the social platforms we use empower it and these food chains woven around us leave us outside the reward circle.

Contextonomics, the economics of context, on the other hand, cannot be easily manipulated in that way. This currency of the attention economy has a very strong subjective element inherently woven into it. It calls for explicit cooperation.

The value of the personal context around an informative transaction is something that only the parties involved can assess, as a measure of value and trust. Marketers depend on us and our explicit participation. It demands a higher level of transparency, of willing participation – and therefore entitled to a reward – a transparent food chain, between willing participants, for the benefit and reward of all parties involved.

In an Icentered world, a new kind of enterprise is introduced – ME.   I am an enterprise of one – an ecosystem that consumes, produces and interacts in the digital web.

What does  such an eco system look like and how does it operate?

• I am a fully equipped enterprise, with all the assets necessary to operate  in the digital world.
• All the structured and unstructured data about me are in my possession, under my control and managed by me.
• I have all sort of “machinery” to sustain me in the network –mobile phone, PDA, computer, laptop…
• I have all kinds of communication platforms to sustain my communication and business propagation – mail systems, social platforms, IM, VoIP, mobile marketing platforms.
• I am part of a large ecosystem where my friends and colleagues, family members and people I interact with  are also ecosystems of one.
• All those ecosystems are parts of a much larger ecosystem comprised of  friends, colleagues, peers, providers, distributors, communities, marketplaces, services, media, appliances,….
• Each one of us, is an Itomic ecosystem.
• Our role vs. other ecosystems may vary, we may be  providers, consumers, socializers, marketers, consultants – but  in each such case we have some prism of interest or value for other ecosystems.
• The activation of such interaction of value and interest point is not always proactively initiated by us.
• The key is context. The context is two folded – the context of the ecosystem that has just been created  ad-hoc, and my relevant context to become part of such an ecosystem.
•  This key  can be initiated by a search query on a topic both me and some people in my social sphere are interested in, hang-out  event with people in my locality, a content related interaction, a work related team activity….  In each such activity I am part of an eco system.
• I can be the center of this ad-hoc ecosystem, a close or remote node – but always   within context to this ecosystem.
• My presence in different value levels in many ecosystems, creates different value points both for me and for that ecosystem.
• A MeInside  ( to paraphrase the Inte lnside  hardware branded component) element can be in parallel  part of many eco-systems. 
• This stems from a context based economy model where my different context values in different ecosystems is based on the ability to contextify me as a whole – the principle of contexting people and not the interactions.
• Various methods can be applied- a proactive  selection of choices of context strings related to me, anautomatic feed, optional pull -  all transparent to create a soft value of credibility. 
• A context based virtual environment is created. It contains a subjective scale of me within that food chain,  for  each context based interaction.
• This relativity of subjective values constantly fluctuates, depending on its merit in various context based ecosystems.
• In order to create a context based economy there is a need in an objective measurement scale that will measure subjective proximity on an objective context scale. These  metrics will allow the creation of context based food chains, marketplaces and monetizations chemes that will become tools of the trade.
• This scale cannot be owned by any corporation – it has to be owned by the people for privacy and security reasons – various forms are possible .
• On this infrastructure, a context based monetization system can be built.  The currency does not have to be real – alternative currencies can be context based. E.g.  downloading a movie for  a cheaper rate in exchange of targeted ads. 
• The principle of exchange – Pay per context, targeted ad, advertisement supported content consumption, my functions may vary –I may get an ad directly as a consumer or  become a distributor, bridge the advertisers’ target market and send it as a reliable source to someone you think may be interested in this information.
• My social sphere that is to me a social network,  becomes a context based monetized social media distribution channel for marketers and I become a context based distribution hub of  my social sphere  for marketers and advertisers.
•  In each such instance I am an integral part of the context based eco-system created around me or where I am part of.
• I am rewarded directly by context based monetizing options.
• Top down supply chains are replaced by context based long tail ad-hoc food chains, catering for Itomic needs. Each one of us can become a supplier, distributor, marketer or consumer in these food chains in direct relation to their place in the ecosystem.
• I am rewarded in the same way other participants in that food chain are rewarded, with direct relevance to my value in that food chain.
• It creates context based marketplaces where ad-hoc seamless food chains are created and disintegrated .
• Individuals, corporates, communities wil lcreate suites of tools, apps and food chains generators to empower this context based economy.

Such a  framework can empower Contextonomics – a context based economy.

A blunt publicity stunt pulled in broad daylight, through the front door, for commercial purposes, abusing President Obama.

Same is true for you and me. Different perspective – same goal.

 It was not president Obama that Weatherproof was really after. It was us. This is who advertisers are after – with means justifying ends, imposing on our privacy and rights.

Every day we are being abused for advertising purposes. Not in broad daylight, we are not endorsing celebs. Through the back door, mostly without our knowledge or consent, we are being tracked, monitored, million$ companies are trying to capture all knowledge about us and our social spheres – so they can best target us and our friends with their offerings.

From an Icentered point of view, both president Obama and we are parts of food chains created around us, that should be made with our consent, with us partners to the profits made from it.

President Obama’s context as a public figure was distorted for commercial ends.

Our contexts, as private people, are being invaded and abused for commercial ends.

The current paradigm stems from the providers’ need to know what to expose or offer to us, to grab our attention. For that they need over time observation of our interests and choices, even if it implies abusing our private information so that their ROI (return on investment) profits from our attention economy. Marketers pay 3rd party companies for reaching us – advertising agencies, platforms, data companies, behavioral targeting. We are excluded from the economics of these food chains, yet it is all about and around you and me.

Contextonomics, the economics of context the Icentered way, challenges existing orders. It is based on the following principles:

• My context is my capital. Owned by me.
• It should reside at my end, and not dispersed all across in various walled gardens or monitored by search engines and tracking companies. It is mine, with the key in my hand, used only with my consent.
• Relevant offers are welcome. Context based relevance is a blessing for decluttering, sorting out the noise in the information and offerings glut. 
• The push model of targeted ads should be reversed, empowering us to PULL advertising content where we are best served if the advertisements we interact with are indeed relevant and maximize our ROA (Return on Attention).
• My context is a currency. I should be part of that food chain – sharing and gaining for all parties involved.
• Any use of my context should be transparent, with my consent and through the front door.
• It can be used as an alternative currency for direct trading.
• My context’s usage direction is reversed – It is me, the user, negotiating with a cloud of potential vendors over the usage of my context rather than an advertiser abusing a cloud of potential users I order to reach them.

We should be able to handle attention transactions with the same simplicity and exactness that we do with money. Today, the technologies and platforms for enabling direct revenue streams and food chains for both users and developers of relevance based services are not yet in place. But there is no doubt that principles and blueprints for their materialization should stem from a participatory paradigm that rightfully  treats both president Obama, you and me.

Endless availability (content, services, and social platforms) makes it difficult to sort out the noise. Using the web as an integral part of how we live – a web of life, overwhelms; world flattening is not without a price.

Information glut… a flood of web socializing platforms… makes attention our scarcest resource.

24 hours a day and no attention to spare.

Wealth of information creates scarcity of attention. How can I filter out the clutter, gate out irelevance  and optimize my ROA (return on attention)?

 Managing an attention economy in this monsoon of digital interactions is a major impasse for taking the evolving web experience into the next level.

 Personal relevance impasse – personal relevance is an anchor for making personal sense out of all the digital information and communication overpoud.  For enabling  a reasonable ROA ,what I interact with must be in my context, relevant to me, answering my needs, relevant to what I happen to be doing right now, in relation to my past activities, my social relations, my commercial relations… Today my relevance is balkanized in siloed sites, behind walled gardens of providers who struggle to keep me captive, as a means for their profit making mechanisms.

Privacy impasse – To have it in my context, I must expose private information. We were  led to believe that it is a necessary evil, which is for our own good.  I don’t like exposing, and even if I do, I must depend today on one sided privacy and trust management policies of providers. Do I trust them? Do they abuse this trust? Do they walk the walk or just talk the talk? Is there a real way for me to find out?

Portability impasse – Even with my limited trust, the relevant experience I can be provided with, is at best segmented and confined to the walled garden of a specific provider. And what about all the others? I cannot freely move between providers taking my accumulating context with me at my service wherever I go. What good is my profile in Amazon when I google a question? When change is the only constant, any rigid profile I might have with any provider, becomes obsolete the minute I leave the site. My versatile dynamics exceed by far any gated provider or community.

Adaptivity impasse- My freedom is furthered burdened by lack of spontaneity and intuitiveness. When I choose to go elsewhere, whenever I need to interact with something new, I need to learn how to operate it all anew. For my benefit they should be adapting to me, to my way of doing things. Why should I have to learn anew how to send mail for each mail system  and not have the system learn my  sending  mail habits?

These four elements limit today my ability to have a flowing web experience that will turn the web into “my web of life” and promise us, users,  a manageable attention economy.

A variety of recent trend predictions for the social web see an evolution in the making – but no big breakthroughs. To sample just a few:

Axel Scultze presents an interesting prediction for the social web 2010. The outstanding trends he foresees are:

• Twitter will become the leading news system
• Advertising will flood the social space
• LinkedIn will grow significantly
• Social business will thrive as more businesses will enter the social web
• IT departments will open up to social web and adapt the new processes needed for opening up
• Social media marketing will use social media differently
• Social mobility will enhance distributed enterprises and new working models
• Exposure of social graph information will cause some loss members due to privacy concerns
• Corporates will monitor social networks to listen to the customer’s voice in social networks to fine tune offerings
• Social networks will converge with other applications, media and platforms
• Gaming industry will have a stronger presence on the social  web
• Gadgets and add -ons will be developed and used for social applications to enhance communications
• Search will include geo aspects and will include relations
• Groups, communities will not consolidate but will strengthen in impact

He concludes by speaking about the need for earth shattering innovations to manage relations, but assumes that won’t happen in 2010.

David Armano points at 6 social media trends for 2010:

• Filtering will make social media less sociall
• Social business will beef up
• Corporations will look to scale their social business activities and will create incentives for social participation
• Companies will develop social media policies
• Social media will go mobile as users and workers will want to be part of their social sphere
• Sharing no longer means e-mail
  Jennifer Leggio concentrated her 2010 predictions around the question will social media reach ubiquity?  And asked over 30 people from her social media network their opinion on this question.

A variety of views. Fascinating.

 Joel Postman , foresees in 5 social media predictions for 2010 foresses that:

• Augmented reality applications will become mainstream
• Location-Based Applications Will Dissolve Into General Social Networks
• Enterprise Social Software Applications Will Become Commonplace
• More Social Media Regulation Will Follow the FTC’s October Endorsement Guides
• Social Search Will Shake Out, and the Search Metaphor Will Change.

All of them look at the social web from the point of view of the system or from that of corporate who want to use it to reach a goal, as Brad Ward compares it to  a horse race.

To take to a higher scale, beyond next years’ predictions, Jeremaiah Owyang, when he was still at Forrester, wrote a very interesting analysis on where the future of the social web.  He looks at the future of the social web from the point of view of the system.

“…If you can’t see where this is headed, I’ll tell you: all of what we’re doing from our clicks, queries, wall posts and tweets is teaching the ’system’. In the long run we’re creating a massive global computer, an artificial intelligence, and someday, a thinking being.

When the system will reach a stage that it learns about our behaviors, preferences, relations… When such a system’s automation becomes a holy grail, we users should be very afraid – no,  Panic Stricken.

What exactly is that system? Who owns it? How much does it know about me? Is it transparent? Is it all in my consent?  Who owns all this knowledge about me?

When considering an intelligent web, the first thing we need to guarantee is that this web is ours, the people who comprise the people’s grid.  Anything short of a user-owned-web there is no guarantee of who will end up serving whom and what giant wars will evolve over the hegemony of all this.

Adrian Chan ponders on the future of the social web  and examines the system from a user centric prism that looks at my past interactions, forming a social centric prism that learns from my social usage patterns and my interactions with my social sphere.

It still assumes some top down external management that combines several aspects of learning – and as such – raises the same apprehensions.

The future of the web from an Icentered point of view – a people’s grid

The next evolutionary stage of the social web will exceed systems’ learning and will take the human side of the web – us, its users, as the anchor point. From an Icentered point of view, the future of the social web is about the people that comprise it, each one of us, as a member in the people’s grid. It will create a social web that harnesses personal context to add meaning to the communications.

As such my social sphere is all about me.

 I am an Itom in a people’s grid.

With me at its center, my context is the anchor point through which I interact with my social sphere. Taking a holistic approach I am complex, dynamic, holistic, me all across and therefore exceeds the current closed boundaries of social networks.  It means that  I will no longer have to actively sift for relevant friends from a multitude of accumulated social network contacts and actively take care of portability between communities.

Same is true to all others.  All Itom will create  a people’s  grid. Relations and conversations will be contextualized.   It will turn six degrees of separation into a context based social graph of connectedness, both within my social sphere and in its extended perimeters. So that I can communicate with my social spheres through a contextual anchor that ties us ad-hoc to that communication,  regardless of network, place and time.

It will assume:

• Portability and harmonization of my context across disjoint networks,
• Adaptivity to my usage patterns across platforms and devices
• Proactive privacy management of my social relations
• Ad hoc context based sharing around an interaction
• Active participation in business models and food chains around me and my social sphere