Beyond Data Ownership to Information Sharing
The question of who owns our data on the Internet is a challenging problem. It can also be a red herring, distracting us from building the next generation of online services. The term “ownership” simply brings too much baggage from … Continue reading →
The question of who owns our data on the Internet is a challenging problem. It can also be a red herring, distracting us from building the next generation of online services. The term “ownership” simply brings too much baggage from the physical world, suggesting a win-lose, us-verses-them mentality that retards the development of rich, powerful services based on shared information. Anyone up for sacred cow cheeseburgers? I’m a member–and a big fan–of Steve Holcombe‘s “Data Ownership in the Cloud” LinkedIn group and I love the efforts of the Dataportability guys and am a big supporter of the Privacy and Public Policy work group at Kantara. There is a lot of good work being done by folks trying to figure out how to give people greater control over the use of data about them (privacy) and gain access to data they use or created (dataportability). Unfortunately, sometimes the arguments behind these efforts are based on who owns–or who should own–the data. This is not just an intellectual debate or political rallying call, it often undermines our common efforts to build a better system. Consider this: Privacy as secrecy is dead Data sharing is data copying Transaction data has dual ownership Yours, mine, & ours: Reality is complicated Taking back ownership is confrontational Privacy as secrecy is dead First, the data is pretty much already out there. The issue isn’t “How do we keep data from bad people,” it’s “How do we keep people from doing bad things with data?” DRM and crypto and related technology as the sole means to prevent data leakage and data abuse are failures. Sooner or later, the bad guys break the system and get the data. Sure, there are smart things we can do to protect ourselves. Just like we wear seatbelts and lock our front doors, we should also use SSL and multi-factor authentication, but we can’t count on technology to keep our secrets. We need solutions that work even when the secret is out. In fact, privacy isn’t about information we keep secret. It is about information we have revealed to someone else with expectation of discretion, e.g., when we tell our doctor about our sexual activities. It’s no longer a secret from the Doctor, but because it is private, we have rules that keep the information from being used inappropriately. Most of the time, with most doctors, it works. Those few who break those rules are dealt with through legal means, both civil and criminal, as well as social approbation. So, because we inherently need to release data to different parties at different times, we can’t control it through secrecy alone. Instead, we need to build a framework for preventing abuse when others do have access to sensitive information. Like in the case with our doctor, we want our service providers to have the data they need to provide the highest quality services. Data sharing is data copying Second, in the world of atoms, there can only be one of a thing, which is the reverse of the world of bits. With atoms, even if there are copies, each copy is itself a singular thing. Selling, transferring, or stealing a thing precludes the original owner from continuing to use it. This isn’t true for information, which can easily be sold, transfered, and stolen without disturbing the original version. In fact, the entire Internet is basically a copy machine, copying IP packets from router to router, as we “send” images, web pages, and emails from user to user and machine to machine–each time a new copy is created whether or not the originating copy is deleted. To think of bits as if they were ownable property leads to attempted solutions like DRM that try to technologically prevent access to the information within the data, which is only good until the first hacker cracks the code and distributes it themselves. Instead, if we build social and legal controls on use, we can give information more freely, but under terms set by each individual when they share that information. Enforced by social and legal rather than purely technological means, this makes the most of the low marginal cost of distributing online, while retaining control for contributors. Transaction data has dual ownership Image via Wikipedia Third, much interesting data is actually mutually owned… which means the other guy can already do whatever the heck they want with it. Consider web attention data, the stream of digital crumbs representing the websites we’ve visited and any interactions at each: all our purchases, all our blog posts, all our searches. Everything. Some folks argue that we own that data and therefore have the right to control the use of it. But so too do the owners of the websites we’ve been visiting. We don’t own our http log entries at Amazon. Amazon does. In fact, in every instance where two parties interact, where we engage in some transaction with someone else, both parties are co-creating that information. As such, both parties own it. So, if we tie the issue of control to ownership, then we’ve already lost the battle, because every service provider has solid claims to ownership over the information stored in their log files, just as we, as individuals, own the browsing history stored on our hard drive by Firefox, Internet Explorer and Chrome. In the movie Fast Times at Ridgemont High, in a confrontation with Mr. Hand, Spicoli argues “If I’m here and you’re here, doesn’t that make it our time?” Just like the time shared between Spicoli and Mr. Hand, the information created by visiting a website is co-created and co-owned by both the visitor and the website. Every single interaction between two endpoints on the web generates at least two owners of the underlying data. This is not a minor issue. The courts have already ruled that if an email is stored for any period of time on a server, the owner of that server has a right to read the email. So, when “my” email is out there at Gmail or AOL or on our company’s servers, know that it is also, legally, factually, and functionally, already their data. Yours, mine, & ours: Reality is complicated Fourth, when two parties come together for any reason, each brings their own data to the exchange. We need a framework that can handle that. Iain Henderson breaks down this complexity in a blog post about your data, my data, and our data, talking about an individual doing business with a vendor, for example, someone buying a car. “My data” means data that I, as an individual have that is related to the transaction. It could include the kind of car I’m looking for, my budget, and estimates of my spouse’s requirements to approve of a new purchase. “Your data” means data that the car dealer knows, including the actual cost of the vehicle, the number of units in inventory, the pace of sales, current buzz from other dealers. “Our Data” means information that both parties have in common. That could be Shared Information, explicitly given by one party to the other in the course of the deal, such as a social security number so the dealer could run a credit check. It could be Mutual Information, generated by the very act of the transaction, such as the final sale price of the vehicle. Or, it could be Overlapping Information, which each party happens to know independently, such as the Manufacturer Suggested Retail Price (MSRP) of a vehicle (which we found online before heading to the dealership). The ownership of “your” and “my” data is usually clear. However, ownership of the different types of “our” data is a challenge at best. To complicate matters further, every instance of “my data” is somebody else’s “your data”. In every case, there is this mutually reciprocal relationship between us and them. In the VRM case, we usually think of the individual as owning “my data” and the vendor as owning “your data”, but for the vendor, the reverse is true: to them their data is “my data” and the individual’s data is “your data”. Similar dynamics occur when the other party is an individual. I bring my data, you bring your data, and together we’ll engage with “our” data. We need an approach that respects and applies to everyone’s data, you, me, them, everybody. In these complex Venn diagrams of ownership, it is more important who controls the data than who owns it. We’ve already lost the crudest form of control–secrecy–and we are going to continue to lose more as we opt-in to seductive new services based on divulging more and more information: our purchase history, browsing activity, and real-world location data. But we still need to control how all this data is used, to protect our own interests while still enjoying the benefits of the great big copy machine that is the Internet. Taking back ownership is confrontational © Regien Paassen | Dreamstime.com Fifth, we don’t need to pick a fight to change the game. There is a lot of data out there that many of us believe we should have control over. I agree. A lot of people argue that we should have the right to exclude other people’s use because we own the data, because it’s ours in some legal, moral, or ethical framework. The problem is, those other people already have it, and they also believe that they are legitimate owners. In fact, many of them paid for that data, buying it from data aggregators who compile all sorts of things about people, from both public and private sources. This entire ecosystem of customer data is a multi-billion dollar business and every single player “owns” the data they are working with. So if we focus our energy in claiming ownership over that same data in order to take control, we are framing the conversation as a fight, a fight against a powerful, well-healed, well-funded, entrenched bunch of opponents. Most of these “opponents” are the very people we are trying to win over to our way of thinking. These are the vendors we want to embrace a new way to do business. These are the technologists we want to transform their proven, value-generating CRM systems to work with our data on our terms, instead of their data on their terms. Arguing over ownership puts these potential allies on the defensive, when what we really want is their collaboration. From Ownership to Authority, Rights, and Responsibilities Rather than building a regime based on data ownership, I believe we would be better served by building one based on authority, rights, and responsibilities. That is, based on Information Sharing. Who has the authority to control access and use of particular information? What rights does a party have in using and distributing a piece of information? What responsibilities does an information user have to others with respect to that information? Let’s stop arguing about who owns what and start figuring out how we can share information in ways that allow everyone to win. When we collect all of our information into a single conceptual repository, and then share access to it with service providers on our own terms, we create a high quality, highly relevant, curated personal data store. This allows us to bootstrap a control regime over all of our data in a way that creates new value for us and for our service providers. Now, instead of iTunes Genius or a Last.FM scrobbler only having access to our media use with their service, they can provide recommendations based on all the information stored in our personal audio data store. We get better recommendations and they get better data to drive their services. This personal data store is entirely under the authority of the user, sharing information with service providers according to specific rights and responsibilities. The Information Sharing approach neatly sidesteps the complexities involved in privacy and dataportability issues of the information already known by service providers. These remain serious issues, worth addressing. Resolving them will require long term investment in the legal, regulatory, moral, and political systems that govern our society. Fortunately, sharing the information in our personal data store can begin almost immediately once we have working specifications. This controlled sharing of information will dramatically increase our comfort level when revealing our intentions and interests. We would have control over the use–and would be able to prevent abuse–of that information, while making it easy for service providers to improve our lives in countless ways. At the Information Sharing Work Group at the Kantara Initiative, Iain Henderson and I are leading a conversation to create a framework for sharing information with service providers, online and off. We are coordinating with folks involved in privacy and dataportability and distinguish our effort by focusing on new information, information created for the purposes of sharing with others to enable a better service experience. Our goal is to create the technical and legal framework for Information Sharing that both protects the individual and enables new services built on previously unshared and unsharable information. In short, we are setting aside the questions of data ownership and focusing on the means for individuals to control that magical, digital pixie dust we sprinkle across every website we visit. Image by hegarty_david via Flickr Because the fact is, we want to share information. We want Google to know what we are searching for. We want Orbitz to know where we want to fly. We want Cars.com to know the kind of car we are looking for. We just don’t want that information to be abused. We don’t want to be spammed, telemarketed, and adverblasted to death. We don’t want companies stockpiling vast data warehouses of personal information outside of our control. We don’t want to be exploited by corporations leveraging asymmetric power to force us to divulge and relinquish control over our addresses, dates of birth, and the names of our friends and family. What we want is to share our information, on our terms. We want to protect our interests and enable service providers to do truly amazing things for us and on our behalf. This is the promise of the digital age: fabulous new services, under the guidance and control of each of us, individually. And that is precisely what Information Sharing work group at Kantara is enabling. The work is a continuation of several years of collaboration with Doc Searls and others at ProjectVRM. We’re building on the principles and conversations of Vendor Relationship Management and User Driven Services to create an industry standard for a legal and technical solution to individually-driven Information Sharing. Our work group, like all Kantara work groups, is open to all contributors–and non-contributing participants–at no cost. I invite everyone interested in helping create a user-driven world to join us. It should be an exciting future. This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Award Number IIP-08488990. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this publication are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.
User Driven Services: 1. Impulse from the User
1. Impulse from the User User Driven Services start with the user. People engage the world to satisfy needs and fulfill desires. That engagement marks our intent as we try to bend the universe to our will. User Driven Services … Continue reading →
1. Impulse from the User User Driven Services start with the user. People engage the world to satisfy needs and fulfill desires. That engagement marks our intent as we try to bend the universe to our will. User Driven Services begin with that essential act, responding to each user’s expressed intent to initiate and drive every experience. Industrial era corporate systems put the factory and factory owners at the helm, driving demand and shaping customer behavior by segmenting, targeting, and bombarding potential consumers with stimuli designed to increase sales. This intrusive, wasteful behavior exploited opportunities to invade people’s attention in hopes that they might trigger a purchase or lay the groundwork for a future purchase. In contrast, User Driven Services start with a user’s expressed intention, to buy, to learn more, or to create value in some way, then, they simplify, automate, and speed the path to satisfying that intention. Examples Web Browsers navigate to user selected hyperlinks and URLs, not to pre-programmed schedules of shows constructed to be passively viewed. Search engines present results based on keyword queries, not based on demographics or gender. Emails are sent when you hit send, not before. Cell phones initiate outbound calls only upon users’ direction. Products are shipped when purchased. Credit card information is not requested by vendors until the user has indicated they are ready to make a purchase and credit cards are charged only after explicit confirmation. Questions Do users initiate and motivate the key interactions with the service? Are service interactions always initiated by expressed user intent? Are users free from invasive, unsolicited “push” approaches such as direct mail, SPAM, and telemarketing? Does the service avoid attention invasion? Or does it exploit user attention to present unrequested messages at inconvenient times about potentially undesired opportunities? This article is part of a series. It is the first of ten characteristics of User Driven Services: Impulse from the User Control Transparency Data Portability Service Endpoint Portability Self Hosting User Generativity Improvability Self-managed Identity Duty of Care More soon… This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Award Number IIP-08488990. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this publication are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect teh views of the National Science Foundation.
Our world is continually becoming more and more user driven. From cable TV to YouTube, from newspapers to blogs, from Wal-Mart to eBay, from Ma Bell to the Internet, the shift from centralized, structured systems of authority to emergent, collaborations … Continue reading →
Our world is continually becoming more and more user driven. <img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignright size-full wp-image-357" title="world UI" src="https://blog.joeandrieu.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/04/dreamstime_8489486world-uismall.jpg" alt="world UI" width="180" height="180" srcset="https://blog.joeandrieu.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/04/dreamstime_8489486world-uismall.jpg 180w, https://blog.joeandrieu.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/04/dreamstime_8489486world-uismall-150x150.jpg 150w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 180px) 100vw, 180px" />From cable TV to YouTube, from newspapers to blogs, from Wal-Mart to eBay, from Ma Bell to the Internet, the shift from centralized, structured systems of authority to emergent, collaborations between individuals has been reshaping our political, social, and economic world for generations. This is a trend that has driven—and been driven by—the massive success of the Internet, email, the World Wide Web, eBay, Google, RSS, FaceBook, YouTube, and Twitter. Each of these examples took an existing model and made it more user driven: networking, messaging, electronic publishing, buying & selling, content discovery & advertising, news aggregation/syndication, online video, status updates. The conclusion: companies which find ways to be more user driven are more valuable, more profitable, and more successful. What does it mean to be “user driven”? At its most basic, it means putting the user in charge, in some way. Fully realized, it means putting the user at the center of the system, as a point of integration, origination, and control. We call these fully realized systems “User Driven Services”. User Driven Services put users in charge. Users start each interaction, manage the flow of the experience, and control what and how data is captured, used and propagated. Users are the cause and the controller, working with service providers to co-create collaborations that create value for all parties. From self-serve gas stations and soda fountains to ATMs and self-checkout grocery stores, companies have been putting users in charge of different aspects of their services for years. With GetSatisfaction—which allows users to self-organize for cooperative customer support—and Facebook—which provides social context for user-generated content—users are not just self-servicing, they provide the core content behind the user experience. Now, through user-centric Identity and API access to most popular online services (Flickr, Twitter, Facebook, etc.), users can direct which parts of their experience are serviced by which providers, allowing unprecedented realtime flexibility in service creation. User Driven Services are redefining how we interact, how we manage our businesses, and how we engage in both public and personal conversations. Businesses and organizations that want to thrive in this new reality would do well to help co-create a new mutually beneficial marketplace for products, services, and ideas. Individuals, participating in this rising tide of personal power, have an opportunity to coordinate with each other and with service providers to craft a future that meets all of our needs, as individuals, entrepreneurs and business people. Terminology A few key terms: System: a group of independent but interrelated elements engineered to operate as a unified whole. (The systems to which we refer are not natural or conceptual systems, but rather, operating mechanisms designed and implemented to perform intended functions.) User: any individual interacting with a system. Service: a value generating experience available to users through interactions with a system; also the system providing such experiences. User Driven Services: services that maximize value creation by maximizing user control and authority. Characteristics User Driven Services have the following characteristics: Impulse from the User Control Transparency Data Portability Service Endpoint Portability Self Hosting User Generativity Improvability Self-managed Identity Duty of Care We will explore each of these characteristics in a series of articles over the next few weeks. This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Award Number II+-08488990. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this publication are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect teh views of the National Science Foundation.
In the ProjectVRM Standards Committee discussions, we’ve talked quite a bit about a “One Night Stand” use case, where a personal data store is used with an online retailer and all personal data is erased–as much as possible–after the transaction. … Continue reading →
In the ProjectVRM Standards Committee discussions, we’ve talked quite a bit about a “One Night Stand” use case, where a personal data store is used with an online retailer and all personal data is erased–as much as possible–after the transaction. Teleconference 2008 06 18 Teleconference 2008 07 02 Teleconference 2008 08 13 Teleconference 2008 09 24 Teleconference 2008 10 08 Face to Face 2008 October The premise is simple: if users know they are safe giving personal data, they will give it more freely. Limits on long term data mining (and its attendant offensive behavior of junk mail, spam, and telemarketing) paradoxically increase data sharing and enhance the ability of vendors to provide more meaningful engagement at the moment of the transaction. Less long term data retention leads to more real-time data provided by users, resulting in better customer experiences, and more profit for vendors. Until recently, this was a theoretical argument, a belief by those of us promoting VRM. As Doc Searls puts it, “A free customer is more valuable than a captive one.” Now we have evidence of just how valuable that can be. Jared Spool shares with us the real-world example of a redesign in the direction of the “One Night Stand” that created $300 million in value in the first year: [excerpt edited for brevity. see full article for details] The form was simple. The fields were Email Address and Password. The buttons were Login and Register. The link was Forgot Password. It was the login form for the site. It’s a form users encounter all the time. How could they have problems with it? The problem wasn’t as much about the form’s layout as it was where the form lived. Users would encounter it after they filled their shopping cart with products they wanted to purchase and pressed the Checkout button. It came before they could actually enter the information to pay for the product. “I’m Not Here To Be In a Relationship” We were wrong about the first-time shoppers. They did mind registering. They resented having to register when they encountered the page. As one shopper told us, “I’m not here to enter into a relationship. I just want to buy something.” Some first-time shoppers couldn’t remember if it was their first time, becoming frustrated as each common email and password combination failed. We were surprised how much they resisted registering. Without even knowing what was involved in registration, all the users that clicked on the button did so with a sense of despair. Many vocalized how the retailer only wanted their information to pester them with marketing messages they didn’t want. Some imagined other nefarious purposes of the obvious attempt to invade privacy. (In reality, the site asked nothing during registration that it didn’t need to complete the purchase: name, shipping address, billing address, and payment information.) Not So Good For Repeat Customers Either Repeat customers weren’t any happier. Except for a very few who remembered their login information, most stumbled on the form. They couldn’t remember the email address or password they used. Remembering which email address they registered with was problematic – many had multiple email addresses or had changed them over the years. When a shopper couldn’t remember the email address and password, they’d attempt at guessing what it could be multiple times. These guesses rarely succeeded. Some would eventually ask the site to send the password to their email address, which is a problem if you can’t remember which email address you initially registered with. (Later, we did an analysis of the retailer’s database, only to discover 45% of all customers had multiple registrations in the system, some as many as 10. We also analyzed how many people requested passwords, to find out it reached about 160,000 per day. 75% of these people never tried to complete the purchase once requested.) The form, intended to make shopping easier, turned out to only help a small percentage of the customers who encountered it. (Even many of those customers weren’t helped, since it took just as much effort to update any incorrect information, such as changed addresses or new credit cards.) Instead, the form just prevented sales – a lot of sales. The $300,000,000 Fix The designers fixed the problem simply. They took away the Register button. In its place, they put a Continue button with a simple message: “You do not need to create an account to make purchases on our site. Simply click Continue to proceed to checkout. To make your future purchases even faster, you can create an account during checkout.” The results: The number of customers purchasing went up by 45%. The extra purchases resulted in an extra $15 million the first month. For the first year, the site saw an additional $300,000,000. Now that’s real money. Hat tip to Abhijit Nadgouda of iface thoughts.
Doc Searls recently brought my attention to a White Paper by Phil Windley, about his company, Kynetx. It does a good job explaining the thinking behind their architecture, and raises some questions that, for me, challenge some underlying assumptions and … Continue reading →
Doc Searls recently brought my attention to a White Paper by Phil Windley, about his company, Kynetx. It does a good job explaining the thinking behind their architecture, and raises some questions that, for me, challenge some underlying assumptions and business choices. Problem Domain The distributed nature of the web is a big part of its power–nobody needs to ask permission from a central authority to use it or create with it. However, that disaggregation limits the cohesion for sophisticated uses, leaving users to hobble together ad-hoc mash-ups of value from multiple, diverse service providers. For example, the average travel planner spends 29 days from their first query to their first purchase. No tool I know of facilitates that entire process effectively. Solving this problem in a general way—while retaining the authority of the individual and the flexibility of open systems—is perhaps the greatest opportunity for VRM. The personal data store and VRM relationship services are two prongs of an architectural shift for enabling this kind of aggregation while remaining open. Once you put the user in the driver’s seat, with coherent controls over the flow and the data, the experience can integrate around the user, even as they drive anywhere on the Internet. Solution Kynetx’s solution is built on one primary capability: A rules engine (and language) for contextual customization based on strong identity-based claims, using the user-centric Identity of Information Cards. This puts Kynetx squarely in the web augmentation service business. Adaptive Blue (and their Glue product) is perhaps the most sophisticated approach to this space, but Yahoo’s Toolbar also augments web pages, as does Skype (putting its SkypOut button on any phone # it recognizes), and the granddaddies of all web-augmentation services are the ad blocker plug-ins that remove banner ads on websites. I distinguish web augmentation from web media enhancements, like PDF and Flash and Java, in that the latter are embeddable or downloadable extensions to the core HTML/http architecture of the web, while augmentation services provide third-party manipulation of website presentation on behalf of the user. They actually tweak the web page as the user sees it, rather than offering websites a new way to package content or functionality. Web augmentation isn’t new, but it is gaining adoption and breadth. There is a low-grade market war going on in this space. While browsers define the official battleground of the World Wide Web; augmentation services are the guerilla warriors of next generation browsing. The approach that reaches ubiquity first will create significant value throughout the architecture: for users, software vendors, and service providers. So, the question that comes to my mind is where does Kynetx fit into all of this? The value proposition of a rules-engine for customization is powerful, if that engine makes it easy to leverage strong identity. Every website will, imo, want to take advantage of the unique value of user-centric identity and Information Cards in particular. However, rewriting your customization to do that will take resources and that will slow adoption. If Kynetx can simplify how websites plug- in to the Identity meta-layer that sounds like a real value. Gaps There are however, several gaps that I see in Kynetix’s approach mapped out in the white paper. First, who are the target developers: websites or Third party services. Or both? It’s not clear to me if the primary authors of KRL rulesets (and hence Kynetx’s customers) will be the destination website developers or third party augmentation services. For example, . Adaptive Blue‘s Glue augments web pages so that things like movies can be recognized across domains for social commentary, ratings, and sharing. That means that Glue modifies the presentation of web pages at IMDB, Netflix, Amazon, Blockbuster, etc. In this pattern, it is the third-party, Glue, that would be running KRL rulesets, not the websites. Is this the intended architecture for Kynetx? Is the point of the Kynetx Information Card to provide authorization by the user to allow services like Glue to augment their web experience, while the rest of the plug- in handles injection into the web page within the browser? Or, is the main point that web services themselves would leverage Kynetx’s Information Card approach to manage third party identity for customization? For example, so Hertz could seamlessly provide AAA or AARP discounts if, and only if, the appropriate AAA or AARP information cards (KIX) are presented by the user? In this case, Hertz writes the customization, but doesn’t need to know upfront what the user’s affiliations might be. If the first case is intended, the white paper doesn’t do a good job explaining how this fits into a larger, open ecosystem, nor does it highlight this unique architectural opportunity. If a user wants Orbitz to help augment its travel planning experience, even when it is at Expedia or Southwest airlines or Hilton.com, it would be great to do that in a secure, authorized, privacy-sensitive way. But it isn’t quite clear if this is the point of Kynetx’s approach. (Although it is a great opportunity, one that r-buttons and SwitchBook see in the not-so-far future). If the second case is the goal, it isn’t clear to me why Kynetx is better than other customization frameworks. With a card selector and cards issued from the right authority, users can already present AAA or AARP credentials to websites, which in turn can integrate that information into their existing CMS or other presentation code (Drupal, PHP, perl, Ruby-on-Rails, etc.). If the value proposition is in speed-to-market for identity-based customization, then the white paper needs to make that case first and foremost. If that’s the goal, then it also suggests a business model, which I talk about in a bit. It could also be that both of these are part of the approach: allowing both the website developer and third parties augment the web experience based on strong identity. This is the general idea behind r-buttons and would almost certainly speed deployment. However, the white paper doesn’t address the issues of contention when multiple providers want to augment the same page. Given the open-ended javascript functionality associated with a KIX, this could be a challenge. Second, isn’t re-aggregation actually about creating a coherent context? While the Kynetx approach allows users to present a particular relationship at a particular website, that doesn’t seem to solve the stated problem. I don’t see how it actually achieves a cross-web aggregated experience. In fact, it seems that the best aggregated experience should combine many relationship cards at many different services. In the 29-day travel planning scenario, won’t users need to send their AAA and AARP cards to every site they visit? (Or some large subset?) Does the card selector require a ceremony for every website every session? Or just once and then it is a permanent approval, such as confirming once with Expedia that the user is a AAA member? Managing this A x B complexity with A Information Cards and B websites scales poorly if every site has a distinct ceremony–and even worse if each card presented at each site is a distinct ceremony. This apparent model of KIX based aggregation seems to miss an opportunity, one that is near to my heart as the core of the Search Map architecture for User-driven Search. It seems to me that for a given web-based task–such as travel planning–what you need is a user-driven personal data store that tracks the user’s progress across the Web. This data store should be 100% transparent, 100% editable, and seamlessly transferable/accessible to authorized vendors under terms controled by the user. We call our version of this a Search Map, an electronic document that provides the user a concrete way to manage and express their Search intent. It is also a seamless way to manage and express user context. In the white paper, Phil asserts that “users are freed from managing episode context themselves” as a core benefit. But, I don’t think this is actually a benefit. Attempting to achieve that goal could end up being more patronizing than useful, following in the footsteps of “Clippy” the Microsoft Windows help agent which tried to figure out the context and help users, but failed miserably. “I see you are writing a letter. Would you like assistance?” Ack! It’s not that users don’t want to manage their context, it’s that they haven’t been given simple, value-producing tools to do so. Consider spreadsheets: it’s not that users want to balance the budget on a computer—doing budgets on a computer isn’t inherently rewarding. It’s that spreadsheets make it easy to get value out of balancing their budget on the computer. Managing KIX across 29 days of travel planning and potentially a hundred+ websites sounds like a chore… unless we have a coherent expression of the context (in something like a Search Map, perhaps) that is easy to use and immediately useful. Third, over-centralization limits scale. The Kynetx model, as I understand it, doesn’t scale to the full World Wide Web, because it centralizes two core functions: resolving requests for augmentation and the validation of injection javascript as safe, private, and secure. Both of these constrain the growth opportunity for a KRL-based approach to augmenting web services. First, it places the core usage-time server demand on a single service. Given the business model of charging for ruleset evaluations, there is no obvious incentive for Kynetx to release an open source reference implementation to make it easier for alternate KRE service providers. In fact, there is every expectation that Kynetx will be motivated to “win the market share” battle and be the primary KRE service. Which, unfortunately, makes it just another silo, and will face precisely the same sort of scaling issues that plague Twitter. Second, by making Kinetx the arbiter of “quality” it places a single entity in control ofwhat constitutes “safe”. Even with good intentions, such centralized moral authority is not just dangerous, it alienates potential innovation. Nobody wants to be forced to seek permission for their new functionality. That was, IMO, the primary reason the World Wide Web dominated AOL so quickly. The way to reach web scale is to make it absolutely trivial for /anyone/ to play the game. Several open source implementations and open standards enabled anyone who wanted to, to set up their own web server and try out the World Wide Web as a service provider. And, despite that lack of central control, lots of companies made lots of money providing enhanced software to manage those systems. So don’t fall for the illusion that central control is required or desirable for a big financial win. Signing software is understood technology; we can enable signed KIX functionality with a validated identity as a first step towards quality control. Then, by opening up the validation service–and separating it from the distribution/matching of those KIX functions, we can allow software developers and service providers the freedom to innovate and provide their own approaches to what is valid and what isn’t. Some providers will choose to accept ANY signed KIX and simply track reputation. Others will charge a fee for developers, but run through a quality control check and review. By opening it up, you allow users and developers the freedom to manage KIX quality however they like, without building a presumptive “download at your own risk” ecosystem. With Kynetx the sole authority on “quality” for KIX functionality, we would have both a technical and a political bottleneck that would retard the adoption of a generalized approach to the disaggregated web experience. [Btw, it would be great if there were a name for the javascript injected into the browser when a KRL rule fires after evaluating the context and the user identity. This is currently just the “associated KIX functionality”, which is a bit wordy.] Fourth, what about privacy and data rights management? On the whole, it isn’t clear to me what data might be sent around in the claims of various Information Cards, but there is no discussion in the white paper about the data rights associated with that information. If I’m telling Hertz that I’m an AARP member, can they use that data to start sending me junk mail or SPAM targeting AARP members? Frankly, this is a hole in the entire user-centric Identity framework. OpenID Attribute Exchange and Information Cards allow users to use a third party service for the management and presentment of minimally sophisticated facets of identity (much better than username & password), but neither inherently enables users to specify a data rights regime for the claims or attributes so provisioned. In effect, we’ve made it easy for users to provide additional data about themselves, but missed the opportunity for users to easily control the use of that data. Since Kynetx has a goal of seamlessly augmenting users’ web experience, isn’t it incumbant on them to assure that seamlessness both protects users’ right to privacy and prevents unintended over-customization based on supposedly private data? This is another manifestation of the “Tivo thinks I’m gay” problem, where Tivo analyzes viewing behavior and assumes things about the user, with no way for the user to manage their profile. The data rights problem happens because there is nothing to keep Tivo from telling Hertz, GE, or NBC they think the user is gay. The problem in the Kynetx approach happens when service providers start passing presumably private data to third parties—and users lack the means to control that leakage once the service provider knows certain data. This level of data rights control needs to be built in from the start for VRM and user-driven applications. Business Model At the core, I think the business model needs rethinking. Although a CPM-based pricing for KRL evaluations seems to align the value proposition directly with costs, it actually presents more risk and less control to potential customers than other models. It also presents greater risk and less stability for Kynetx itself. What service providers and developers want to see in a technology platform is one with a free entry point (so you can get testing and trying it ASAP, even if a production system would need a for-fee license), a constrained, predictable cost structure, and economies of scale. Charging per evaluation offers none of these. This model instead creates an artificial scarcity and then charges by the drop. What you want is to create abundance and sell buckets and hoses and pumps. Doc calls this the “because of” effect. Constraining KRL evaluation to support a pay-by-drink business model will artificially constrain adoption. Instead, run to ubiquity and sell the best tools for leveraging the system you’ve helped create. At the same time, the evaluation of rulesets will have highly variable demand, with great spikes and drops far outside of Kynetx’s control. Tying revenue to that demand volatility means an unpredictable, wild revenue profile, flattening out only with insanely large numbers of users. This works for mega services like Amazon Web Services, but for a start up moving from initial revenue to predictable cash flow, it can be unsettling. In contrast, an IDE sales model or subscription based service with monthly fees bounds developer expenses and stabilizes the revenue curve. I like the idea of KRL rulesets. Currently, SwitchBook is planning on using Javascript, RegEx, and XPath, for similar evaluations. That approach not only feels ad-hoc, it is. I’d like to see a unified approach that is flexible, cross-platform, and supported by a good development and test environment. I think Kynetx could go far by creating an open source platform for KRL rulesets, then providing a robust IDE and testing framework for those who want to manage KRL rules to meet business needs. I think this is nicely pointed to in the mention in the White Paper of A/B testing with different KRLs. This is precisely the kind of sophistication that businesses will need to make the most of KRLs and which can easily be separated from the core infrastructure that enables KRLs in an open way for everybody. Also, the consulting opportunities to analyze, customize, and manage KRL rulesets is a huge business opportunity. Doing that well is likely to remain a black art for a long time to come; helping Fortune 1000 companies do it well should be lucrative. As Dale Olds put it referring to Novel’s Bandit Project: First, enable an open identity-metasystem, then sell tools to companies to help them manage it. Collaborations I like the value proposition of platform-independent identity-based customization. It fits well with VRM’s r-buttons, MyDex’s Personal Data Store service, and SwitchBook’s Search Maps. I think there’s still some brain work to be done figuring out how we can all support each other and simultaneously build sustainable business models, but I’ve no doubt there’s a way if we all invest in exploring those opportunities. Although I focused on questions and concerns about Kynetx in this post, I have great respect for Phil and hope to work with him as both our companies–and the entire VRM community–build out viable solutions to these kinds of problems.
Happy New Year! I am looking forward to 2009. There has been lots of change, both professionally and personally, this year, putting me (and SwitchBook) on a trajectory for amazing things in the year ahead. One of my New Year’s … Continue reading →
Happy New Year! I am looking forward to 2009. There has been lots of change, both professionally and personally, this year, putting me (and SwitchBook) on a trajectory for amazing things in the year ahead. One of my New Year’s resolutions is to create–and help to create–the world’s first VRM applications in 2009. There are more than a few in the works, at various stages of development. After a long gestation, I believe several are ripe for coming to market. It’s fun working with a community of like-minded folks to create something grander and better than one could have alone. That’s a big part of the joy of open source and it is a huge part of what Doc Searls brings to Project VRM. It’s a great crowd. I’m excited about what we’re doing together and I hope you’ll join us in 2009, in some way, large or small.