Vendor Relationship Management – joeandrieu.com
type: channel
description: My personal space
date: 2012-05-02T15:37:26Z
update period: hourly
update frequency: 1
update base: 2000-01-01T12:00+00:00
generator agent: https://wordpress.org/
items: It all starts with sharing…
items: Fourth Parties are agents. Third Parties aren’t necessarily.
items: Facebook as Personal Data Store
items: Beyond Data Ownership to Information Sharing
items: Introducing User Driven Services
items: Farewell Google Notebook, Move over SearchWiki, We need a Search Map
items: Notes on User Driven Search
items: Social Graph is Plural
items: Towards User Driven Search
items: Answers to a few questions about VRM

It all starts with sharing…
type: item
creator: Joe Andrieu
date: 2012-05-02T15:37:26Z
subject: Information Sharing
subject: ProjectVRM
subject: Shared Information
subject: User Driven
subject: Vendor Relationship Management
subject: IIW
subject: iiw14
subject: information sharing work group
subject: ISWG
subject: Kantara
subject: Kantara Initiative
subject: label
subject: legal
subject: notice
subject: open standard
subject: open standards
subject: privacy
subject: privacy policy
subject: standard information sharing label
subject: standard label
subject: terms of service
subject: terms of use
subject: TOS
subject: TOU
subject: VRM
description: From kindergarten through our professional life, sharing binds us together as friends, colleagues, and collaborators, so perhaps it should be no surprise that online sharing through services like Facebook, Twitter, and email shapes our online social life. Yet sharing online … Continue reading →
encoded: From kindergarten through our professional life, sharing binds us together as friends, colleagues, and collaborators, so perhaps it should be no surprise that online sharing through services like Facebook, Twitter, and email shapes our online social life. Yet sharing online is anything but simple. The details of what happens with the information we share is often hidden behind long, complicated legal agreements that almost no one reads. If we’re lucky, they are explained in Terms of Service and Privacy Policy documents, sometimes buried out of view, other times forced on us like ransom notes forcing us to state our compliance or leave the site. It doesn’t have to be that way. Today, at the Internet Identity Workshop, we officially launch the Standard Information Sharing Label, which makes it easy for websites to say in simple, consistent language what they do with our information, making it easier for individuals to make better decisions about the information we share online. The Information Sharing Work Group has published a draft specification defining the Standard Label as well as a Kickstarter project to finance its graphic design. The Kickstarter has a brief video explaining the effort. The official press release is here. The work is free to use and open to collaborators. In all my years contributing to the VRM conversation, few projects have made me as proud as I am of the work behind the Standard Label. Check it out. If you like it, please spread the word and consider chipping into help take this work to the next level.

Fourth Parties are agents. Third Parties aren’t necessarily.
type: item
creator: Joe Andrieu
date: 2011-04-13T19:16:43Z
subject: ProjectVRM
subject: Vendor Relationship Management
subject: Doc Searls
subject: fourth parties
subject: Platform
subject: VRM
description: Fourth Parties is a powerful, but sometimes confusing term. In fact, I think Doc recently mischaracterized it in a recent post to the ProjectVRM mailing list. Normally, I wouldn’t nitpick about this, but there are two key domains where this … Continue reading →
encoded: Fourth Parties is a powerful, but sometimes confusing term. In fact, I think Doc recently mischaracterized it in a recent post to the ProjectVRM mailing list. Normally, I wouldn’t nitpick about this, but there are two key domains where this is vital and I’m knee deep in both: contracts and platforms. Doc said: Like, is the customer always the first party and the vendor the second party? Well, no. So, some clarification. First and second parties are like the first and second person voices in speech. The person speaking is the first person, and uses the first person voice (I, me, mine, myself). The person being addressed is the second person, and is addressed in the second person voice (you, your, yourself). And To sum it up, third parties mostly assist vendors. That is, they show up as helpers to vendors. The first point is great, and if you continue this further (and make the leap from parties to data providers), you get something like this: 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.. Which is from my post on data ownership. The trick is that 1st party and 2nd party perspectives are symmetrical. We are their 2nd party and they are their 1st party. Whatever solution we come up with in the VRM world needs to work for everyone as their own 1st party. Every…

Facebook as Personal Data Store
type: item
creator: Joe Andrieu
date: 2010-12-20T11:24:30Z
subject: Information Sharing
subject: Personal Data Store
subject: ProjectVRM
subject: Facebook
subject: Facebook Connect
subject: I Shared What?!?
subject: PDS
subject: Vendor Relationship Management
subject: VRM
description: With over 150 million people using Facebook Connect every month at over 1 million websites, Facebook has ushered in a new era, as the world’s largest personal data store. Personal Data Stores Personal data stores allow individuals to share online … Continue reading →
encoded: With over 150 million people using Facebook Connect every month at over 1 million websites, Facebook has ushered in a new era, as the world’s largest personal data store. Personal Data Stores Personal data stores allow individuals to share online data with service providers. Facebook Connect users can give third-party web sites like Digg, Amazon, and YouTube access to information stored at Facebook, turning Facebook into a personal data store for over 500 million people. What makes personal data stores special is the seamless sharing with websites for real-time personalization of the web. It’s more than just file back-up or synchronization. It’s not just publishing “content” to our friends or the public. Personal data stores allow us to bring our information to websites when we want to. It’s a way to treat the user as the point of integration. Personal data stores can be anywhere, shared with websites whenever we want. Consider giving FedexKinko‘s a link to a Flickr account so they can download photos to print a new calendar. Or giving a new doctor permission to access our personal health history rather than filling out a paper form while we sit in the waiting room. Or giving a website access to our Outlook contact list on our desktop computer so they can give us birthday reminders and gift suggestions. The key is user-managed access, wherever the data lives. Facebook Connect gives this kind of access control over all the data we store at Facebook, enabling web-wide personalization built around the individual. Mash-ups In recent years, mash-ups and real-time APIs have made it easier and easier for companies to combine information from different services into a single user experience. Instead of building bigger and more complicated proprietary data silos, companies take advantage of services like Google Maps and IP-address geolocation, using real-time information to enhance their websites. Some service are even built around other companies’ data: Twitter clients like…

Beyond Data Ownership to Information Sharing
type: item
creator: Joe Andrieu
date: 2010-01-21T22:32:19Z
subject: Information Sharing
subject: Intention Economy
subject: Personal Data Store
subject: ProjectVRM
subject: Shared Information
subject: User Driven Services
subject: Vendor Relationship Management
subject: CRM
subject: data ownership
subject: Doc Searls
subject: privacy
subject: project VRM
subject: User Driven
subject: VRM
description: 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 →
encoded: 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…

Introducing User Driven Services
type: item
creator: Joe Andrieu
date: 2009-04-26T00:24:45Z
subject: Intention Economy
subject: User Driven Services
subject: Vendor Relationship Management
subject: Internet
subject: ProjectVRM
subject: VRM
subject: World Wide Web
description: 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 →
encoded: 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 …

Farewell Google Notebook, Move over SearchWiki, We need a Search Map
type: item
creator: Joe Andrieu
date: 2009-01-19T05:02:59Z
subject: ProjectVRM
subject: Search
subject: User Driven Search
subject: Vendor Relationship Management
subject: advanced search
subject: Complex Search
subject: Doc Searls
subject: Google
subject: Google Notebook
subject: search map
subject: SearchWiki
subject: SwitchBook
subject: VRM
subject: VRMWorkshop
subject: VRMWorkshop2009
subject: Wikia
description: 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 … Continue reading →
encoded: 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, Google never connected the notebook with Search, despite it being a reasonable solution for keeping track of the kind of discoveries you find when doing advanced searches at a lot of different websites. Instead, Google suggests you try one of their other products: If you haven’t used Notebook in the past, we invite you to explore the other Google products that offer Notebook-like functionality. Here are a few examples, all of which are being actively improved and should meet your needs: SearchWiki – We recently launched a feature on Search that will let you re-rank, comment, and personalize your search results. This is useful when you’ve found some results on Google Search that were really perfect for your query. You can read about how to use SearchWiki in this blog post. Google Docs – If you’re trying to jot down some quick notes, or create a document that you can share with others, check out Google Docs. Tasks in Gmail – For a lightweight way to generate a todo list or keep track of things, we recently launched Tasks in Gmail Labs. Google Bookmarks – For a tool that can help you remember web pages that you liked and access them easily, take a look at Google Bookmarks. You can even add labels to your bookmarks to better organize and revisit them. Sigh. Google Notebook fit a unique spot in the Google product portfolio, and as you can see in the comments on the announcement, a lot of people will miss it. It’s too bad we don’t have our Search organizer product ready, I’d love to swoop in and save the day for all those wayward soles stuck without their Google Notebook. The future holds promise… Still, there something to b…

Notes on User Driven Search
type: item
creator: Joe Andrieu
date: 2008-07-20T21:55:45Z
subject: ProjectVRM
subject: User Driven Search
subject: Vendor Relationship Management
subject: MatchMine
subject: SwitchBook
subject: VRM
subject: VRM08
subject: VRMWorkshop
subject: VRMWorkshop2008
description: 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 … Continue reading →
encoded: 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 create a user-driven market, where individuals engage with vendors on their own terms, creating mutually beneficial relationships that generate new value for everyone involved. So what would it mean to apply user-driven thinking to Search? Traditional search is a mix of user-driven and vendor-centrism. While users can enter any query and be directed to content anywhere on the ‘net, we can’t share our search history with Search Providers of choice, nor do we have control over how our activities are tracked and utilized. There are few, if any, open standards for the searcher side of the experience and few options for moving beyond traditional query-response Search. At the VRM Workshop 2008, we fleshed out some ideas, building on the thoughts introduced in my previous post, as well as ideas discussed at VRM 2008 in Munich and IIW2008a in Mountain View. What I love about the conversations at these unconferences is that they are so rich, literally creating value on a moment-to-moment basis. And these were no exception. Here’s what has emerged so far regarding User-driven Search. 1. User Driven Search is bigger than query/response. User Driven Search is more than what we type into the query box and the results we get back from Search Engines. It covers an entire set of activities that span the Internet, including searches entered at site-specific Search Providers like Expedia, the USPTO, and Circuit City, and all the web pages we visit in-between. It is inherently cross-silo—even non-silo—as it encompasses all of our online efforts around a given Search topic. A recent G…

Social Graph is Plural
type: item
creator: Joe Andrieu
date: 2008-07-15T14:12:09Z
subject: ProjectVRM
subject: Uncategorized
subject: Vendor Relationship Management
subject: social graph
subject: user centrism
subject: User Driven
subject: VRM
subject: VRM2008
subject: VRMWorkshop2008
description: “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 … Continue reading →
encoded: “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 Brother, the TSA, the CIA, and [insert surveillance agency of your jurisdiction here], actually want that single, monolithic view of all the relationships in the world. That’s The Social Graph. In contrast, my social graph is hugely valuable to me. Your social graph matters to you. And it might be interesting to discover where our graph (plural) overlap. But neither of us actually care about The Social Graph. At the VRM Workshop 2008, here at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, it came out that “social graph” is actually plural. Like fish. The Social Graph is a misleading distraction, a handy buzzword we can all slip into our cocktail conversations. But the real value is in the personal, independent social graph we all have. Plural. If you think about it, that’s the only way you can really make sense of it in our user-centric, user-driven world.

Towards User Driven Search
type: item
creator: Joe Andrieu
date: 2008-07-12T07:52:14Z
subject: ProjectVRM
subject: User Driven Search
subject: Vendor Relationship Management
subject: Adriana Lukas
subject: Doc Searls
subject: Google
subject: SwitchBook
subject: VRM
subject: VRMWorkshop
subject: VRMWorkshop2008
description: 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? … Continue reading →
encoded: 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 user-centric development and user-centric identity. User-centric is a nice term, but it could be construed as limiting. For example, user –centric definitely implies that that the user is at the center of attention and the focus of the architecture, but it doesn’t necessarily mean the user is in charge of the experience. That’s a key distinction. Not just tuna salad Adriana explains this difference between user-centric and user-driven as metaphorically the difference between buying ready-made tuna salad or picking and choosing your own ingredients and making the tuna salad yourself. When I first talked with Doc about user-driven instead of user-centric, Jim Carrey’s The Truman Show immediately sprang to mind: from birth, Truman is the protagonist in a huge reality show revolving around him… only he doesn’t know it. The climax of the show is Truman discovering the rest of the world and confronting his father/producer. Clearly the Truman Show is Truman-centric… but it is most definitely not Truman-driven. It’s about impetus and authority For me, user-driven means that the user provides the impetus and is the controlling authority throughout the transaction. Sure, sometimes there is negotiation or collaboration with others… the user isn’t omnipotent, after all. However, the user is in charge of creating his or her own experience. This fits with user-constructed or customized solutions, like the tuna salad recipe. However, it has implications far beyond the limits user-created or user-customizable architectures. Is the user initiating the experience? Is the user’s moral authority the primary control throughout the system? Is the system transparent to users, enabli…

Answers to a few questions about VRM
type: item
creator: Joe Andrieu
date: 2008-06-13T14:45:21Z
subject: ProjectVRM
subject: Vendor Relationship Management
subject: CRM
subject: Doc Searls
subject: FAQ
subject: Shopatron
subject: user-driven commerce
subject: VRM
description: Pignerol Antoine recently asked some questions about VRM and I thought I’d answer them publicly. Is VRM really different from social CRM ? Yes, although exactly how depends on how you define social CRM. Based on my understanding, I would … Continue reading →
encoded: Pignerol Antoine recently asked some questions about VRM and I thought I’d answer them publicly. Is VRM really different from social CRM ?<o></o> <o></o>Yes, although exactly how depends on how you define social CRM. Based on my understanding, I would suggest that VRM is first and foremost about providing value for the user with any vendor, as opposed to using social networking tools with a particular vendor. VRM is vendor agnostic and silo-adverse. The goal is to catalyze the development of tools for individuals through protocols and standards that let them work with any vendor seamlessly, without loss of functionality or services.<o></o> Does VRM work with a CRM ?<o></o> Sure. A CRM is a company-centric system. Every company should pay attention to its customers and CRM is currently the best-of-class thinking on the enterprise-side for how to do that. Different VRM services act on behalf of the individual, yet still require connecting to enterprise systems. For things to be seamless, VRM services should marry into CRM services for fulfillment.<o></o> Can VRM be implemented in all kinds of business?<o></o> Yes. Any business can support VRM services and be compliant with general VRM principles. Ultimately, it will be as easy for a small company to be VRM compliant as it is for a small company to run a blog or a wiki today. That takes some level of technical sophistication, but it is within grasp of any company that wants to invest a small amount of effort using freely available open source tools. Eventually, VRM will be available in the same way.<o></o> What’s needed for VRM to work ?<o></o> <o></o>We need to work through electronic marketplace issues from customers’ perspectives, with attention to the full power of relationships, finding consistent ways to create new value through the network. For the Standards Committee, that means a public conversation starting with users and requirements. Once that is vetted in an open source manner, we can explore particular im…