Vendor Relationship Management

Introducing User Driven Services

Introducing User Driven Services

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 between individuals has been reshaping our political, social, and economic world for generations. This is a [...]

The Great Reconfiguration

The Great Reconfiguration

The Internet  is undergoing a major reconfiguration.
No longer is it sufficient for companies to package a value proposition on their website and then drive traffic to it through ads, search engine optimization, and reciprocal links. Today companies must find ways to provide a value proposition wherever the user might be: on Facebook and Twitter, on [...]

One Night Stand worth $300 Million

In the ProjectVRM Standards Committee discussions, we’ve talked quite a bit about a “One Night Stand” use case, where a personal datastore is used with an online retailer and all personal data is erased–as much as possible–after the transaction.

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Paper Prototype Rocks

Last week we used a prototyping technique that has changed the way I look at development: paper prototyping.
I had heard a bit about this before and it sounded great… but there’s always such a drive to just start coding! Before I reach Carolyn Snyder’s excellent Paper Prototyping, I hadn’t realized what I was missing.
The key [...]

Kynetx takes on Structured Browsing

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 [...]

Farewell Google Notebook, Move over SearchWiki, We need a Search Map

Farewell Google Notebook, Move over SearchWiki, We need a Search Map

Alas, a noble experiment has been slayed by the relentless hand of corporate focus. Google has announced its web-clipping scrapbook Google Notebook will no longer be actively developed.
I’ve mentioned Google Notebook briefly in the past, as a tool for helping with user-driven searches (more) — or complex searches as I used to call them. Unfortunately, [...]

Welcoming 2009

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 [...]

Notes on User Driven Search

Notes on User Driven Search

Whether it’s user-generated content like YouTube, user-written and edited knowledgebases, like Wikipedia and Freebase, or user-centric Identity like OpenID and Information Cards, user-driven thinking is transforming our world. With VRM– Vendor Relationship Management–that revolution reaches the market, creating tools for individuals to get more value out of their relationships with Vendors. The goal is to [...]

Social Graph is Plural

Social Graph is Plural

“Social Graph” is not just a singular noun.
“The Social Graph” is a popular misnomer that has plagued the social networking portability conversation ever since Brad Fitzpatrick catalyzed the blogosphere with a vision about the Global Social Graph.
But in fact, “The Social Graph” has little real value outside of computer science elegance. Nobody but Big [...]

Towards User Driven Search

Towards User Driven Search

It is time to give users more control over Search.
At VRM2008 in Munich and at IIW in Mountain View, I started a conversation about User-Driven Search, the premise: what would it mean for users to truly drive their searches?
User-driven is a new term that came out of the VRM community riffing on the meaning of [...]