Mary Hodder is one of the 8 experts Fast Company tapped to predict evolutionary trends for web 2.o in 2009:
Mary Hodder, Founder of Dabble.com and VP of Product Development, Apisphere
“The future of social media is user’s owning their data, deciding who to send it to. Look for more companies that currently host the user’s identity to have less control over that, as things like Open ID take over and more companies try to compete by giving users more control over themselves. Look for ways users can own their own data, and companies that might offer that, sort of like a personal information bank. The changes may seem subtle but I think we’ll see companies now, like Facebook, who try to be everything to you: your bank account for info, your identity, your tools for publishing, and your bar/restaurant for socializing, having to give up some of those roles or hold them less powerfully. And I don’t think it’s natural for one company to hold all that power. It leaves you with very little control over your online self.
Of course, Facebook will fight this to the last, so they won’t be the first to give up some of this control. Others will and eventually to compete Facebook will follow. But they are the great example of the problem.
The other big change will be in companies finally building for revenue in the social and any other space online, as they build for growth in their free or social products.”
She is clearly pointing to emergence of Vendor Relationship Management tools and also the possibility of information card technologies that give users more control along with OpenID and OAuth that are linking web 2.0 services. She highlights the ‘business model’ issue that still has not been figured out for social networks or for identity technologies. We are hoping to address some of this at a special session of Internet Identity Workshop focused just on business models this winter.
It should be noted that 5/8 experts tapped were women the other 4 are Charlene Li, Rebecca Moore, Susan Mernit & Tara Hunt.
Sounds dead on to me.
I agree that one company or a small set of companies having preferred access/control over user data is not ideal. Sadly, I’m not sure that concentrated control won’t become the norm. Our economic and political systems have strong tendencies to concentrate power – it’s a recurring collective action problem where a small number of players (facebook, google, msft, etc…) have access to lower cost “cooperation” (collusion) than 6 billion citizens of the world – despite the fact that net social benefit would be maximized by a non-collusive approach.
Despite this historical tendency I hope that the power of the net to decentralize / distribute decision making power will lead to more user control over their own data. It’s an ongoing battle and the open stack, data portability, etc.. are all fighting the good fight here.
One other thought, tied to biz models – I have a sense that the most fruitful pathway to user controlled data is focusing on $$$. Recast privacy concerns as monetary ones, where data=gold and control over your data translates into income.
Advertising offers a quick and easy entry point. Imagine a scenario where only the user controls access to their entire pool of data. Individual sites may have access to some subset of the data pool but ad delivery/targeting efficiency presumably correlates positively to the size of the data pool. Advertisers would then have a preference for targeting ads based on the complete data pool, which only the user has access too and which the user could $ell to the highest bidder.
There are some technical hurdles to providing translucent data (vs. full transparency) but we went to the moon & decoded the human genome so I’m crossing my fingers that we’ll be able to build secure, flexible, translucent identity/data systems in the near future.
Anyway, those are my morning thoughts on Identity & Data. Thanks for the great work in this space.
Best,
Chris Camp