Personal relationship with the enemy

I recently had a conversation with one of the "normal" people, i.e. the ones that aren't cursed with thoughts on what will happen in the future of the web—in this case, my girlfriend. She's a great person to talk to because, to put it mildly, she doesn't give a damn about the philosophical implications of the web—she just cares about getting too much junk mail, greedy advertisers with a hand in her pocket (and a database full of her purchasing behaviour), and how much Amazon knows about her. In this sense, she's like 98% of the US.

So we got to talking about advanced advertising opportunities—on television, the web and with wireless devices. By the way—just because seeing the numbers really drove home the point for me this week—there are roughly 58M broadband households in the US, but there are over 220M wireless devices (mostly phones). Apples to oranges, I know, but seeing those numbers really made it plain to me what all the fuss about the wireless space is about, even though I myself can't imagine watching television on my phone, and I think anyone who does probably spends way too much time in hospital waiting rooms.

People are concerned about security and intrusion of privacy—that's a given. The web is softening some of this, through things like Amazon, Facebook or even Pandora, but these are all contextual instances where people willingly exchange privacy for a practical benefit (i.e. relevant product suggestions from Amazon, expanding social ties on Facebook, and new musical discoveries on Pandora). What most people couldn't digest yet—and I'm one of them—is the idea of one database which would amass ALL of this information centrally. Imagine a scenario where your cable provider feeds you ads during normal broadcasts which are based on your purchasing behaviour as tracked by your credit card activity, or your musical preferences as tracked by Pandora, or a specific social demographic, as derived from your Facebook profile. Creepy, huh? But, at the same time, can you imagine how much this kind of profiling would be worth to advertisers, and how it would begin to do away with seeing ads that have nothing to do with your actual life and interests?

There are efforts underway in the cable industry to start narrowing down and targeting ads at audiences based on specific attributes. We're nowhere near the scenario described above, for many reasons (some of them regulatory), but advertisers (who pay for television, after all) are starting to demand more bang for their buck. So what about giving them access to the whole you, but only on an invitational basis?

The way I think about it is to envision a "bubble" around myself. This bubble contains all that I am—quite literally in this metaphor. Remember, this is a metaphor—I'll explain what it means later, but for the purposes of explaining this, just bear with the metaphor. I live in this bubble, and I control this bubble. I can poke holes in it to let the outside world in, but only I control how big the holes are, and where they are. This is important, because the world I live in is a torrent of information. Not all of it is relevant to me, and I certainly don't want to let it all in. At the same time, I don't want to completely isolate myself, and there's plenty of stuff out there that I don't know about, but would most definitely be interested in learning about. So I want to make sure other people are allowed inside, but again, I want to make sure I control who comes in, and what they're allowed to see. This could be family, friends, colleagues, etc. In time, when I've established a relationship with them, I can trust them to create very small holes in my bubble on my behalf—through trust-based recommendations. This way, I get to discover new ideas, thoughts, and yes, even products and services.

The key to all this is that I own and control my information. In the real world, this would be akin to having all this information hosted on a physical device that I own—my PC, my phone and my set top box. In this scenario, I own my set top box; i.e. it's not rented from my service provider. Better yet, the information is shared directly with my television from my PC, bypassing the set top box altogether. These devices share a detailed profile of me, but it stays hosted locally on the devices themselves or on a home network—in other words, my profile doesn't go out to the world unless I allow parts of it to (the equivalent of poking holes in my bubble).

Think of this as a sort of identity portfolio, but in this context it's not hosted and managed on some sort of "personality portfolio" website (like Facebook or MySpace). And here's the beauty--it doesn't compete with Facebook, LinkedIn or any other such site. Think of it as an application like Outlook. Outlook has my email, contacts and calendar. It's all hosted locally on my PC, and all of the data contained can be synched with other devices (my Blackberry, for instance). What if I add social content to it? Stuff like my friends by degree of closeness, my resume, colleagues, pictures, my blog, my to do list, my amazon wish list, etc. All of this is hosted on my machine, and all of it is entirely mine to share—if, where and when I choose to do so.

By way of example, if I log on to Facebook, I can "synch" my Facebook profile with the information on my machine that I want to share. Imagine a page on Facebook where it basically says "here's the information you have on your machine (broad categories, mind you—not the details). What do you want to make visible to the Facebook community?" Same for Amazon. Same for Joost. You check a few boxes, and you're off to the races. The site knows whatever information about you that you chose to share, that enhances your experience in some meaningful way, but no more.

There's more, but that's enough for now.