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Archive for December, 2008

Working toward Personalized Commerce

December 13th, 2008
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The Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada made this outstanding video called Privacy and Social Networks. It’s important to understand, as this video shows, that this harvesting of personal data is going on all the time.

Coaching moment: There are two sides to this problem. On one side are the account holders of these social networking sites. They are busy disclosing their interests, connections, and lives. These account holders may not realize that they are being mapped and sold out to the extent that they are. Perhaps they think it’s ok.

On the other side are the businesses that run these sites. They have Terms of Service (TOS) contracts that account holders agree to, whether they read the terms or not. The businesses engage in harvesting and selling practices that benefit their bottom line. (Would you expect anything less? They are businesses, and this is one way that it’s done.) The problem is that the buying and selling of account holder data is not transparent to the account holders.

If this makes you feel uneasy (and I think it should), think about how you’d change this model. An underlying assumption of the whole user data exchange is that companies want to sell you their stuff. The harvesting and data collection is about making sure you’re more likely to be interested in what they want to sell you. Marketers don’t like guessing, and they often get it wrong. (When you don’t buy, it’s a wasted catalog).

But what would it look like if you had a platform for requesting marketing material for something you’re interested in buying, instead of getting angry that you have so much spam and bulk mail (catalogs and the like)?

This is a much longer post about some work being done in this area. Read more…

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On Managing One’s Identity

December 7th, 2008
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This video, an Introduction to Digital Identity by Stefan Brands is from the Google Tech Talk series. This talk was held about a year ago (Jan. 25, 2007). Its an hour long, so get your drinks and munchies ready. As Google Tech Talks go, this one is not overly technical.

Note: the volume is a bit unstable in this video. It starts out loud, about 5 minutes in goes quiet, and continues to change periodically.

Google Tech Talks
January 25, 2007

ABSTRACT

Identity management is increasingly recognized as a cornerstone of electronic communication and transaction systems. Applications such as electronic commerce, social networking, electronic health record management, government online, and enterprise identity and access management all critically rely on the ability to manage, provision, and authenticate the “identities” of people, devices, processes, and other entities. Three approaches to identity management can be distinguished: silo identity management, federated identity management, and user-centric identity management. Each of these has unique characteristics with regards to security, privacy, …

Coaching moment: In this video, you see an introduction to user-based identity. You’ll also hear that this is where the friction starts to develop as people and corporate interests start to disagree on how to implement the future. If you’d like to have a say in one future or another, learn more about the topics of single sign-on, user-centric or user-driven services, and tools to control your digital domain. Talk with your friends about it so the terms become familiar. The stronger our collective personal voice, the harder it will be to erase our personal interests.

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On Connecting with Friends

December 5th, 2008
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Yesterday Google announced Friend Connect, and Facebook announced Facebook Connect. These are two different ways of opening the social network. John (The Real) McCrea has a great article on these two services. ReadWriteWeb also has a great article (thanks Alex K for this link).

With some mixed* feelings, I’m implementing Google’s Friend Connect on this blog. In the right column, you’ll see a box… Read more…

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A peek at Distributed Social Networking

December 3rd, 2008
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One  of the overview ideas about OpenID is that it gives you a place that you can call your own. It’s a URL (a web address) that gives  information about you to other sites that you decide to share that information with. For instance, you can use your OpenID to sign in and make comments on this and certain other blogs, to sign into other services, and to represent yourself (and if you choose to make it public, what you’re doing).

The idea behind distributed social networking is that, like Facebook and MySpace and other social networking sites, you should be able to connect with your friends; but unlike those sites, you aren’t required to create an account on each one of your friends’ other services.

Here’s a great 15 min. video from pixelsebi that explains it.


Distributed Social Networking – An Introduction from pixelsebi on Vimeo.

Coaching moment: In the past, and still to a large extent, web sites want to “own” us and our data. But think about this: their data is merely a point in time, and unless we choose to update that service, their data about us often gets stale and goes out of date. What if we controlled what companies knew about us? There is certain data that might be required for requested transactions, but what might you want the world to know about you?

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