We've now compiled the main points into a single presentation, available on Slideshare and embedded below. You can view the presentation in full screen by clicking the "full" button at the bottom of the presentation. You can also download the presentation as a Powerpoint file. All of the links in the presentation are clickable, should you wish to explore a certain topic more.

1. Structured Data
2. The Real-Time Web
3. Personalization
4. Mobile Web & Augmented Reality
5. Internet of Things

Personalization has long been a buzzword on the Internet. With the glut of information on the Web circa 2009, personalization in this era means providing effective filters and recommendations. Ultimately personalization is about web sites and services giving you what you want, when you want it. That's the long-standing dream anyway. Let's see if the products of 2009 are fulfilling it.

Filtering the Real-Time Firehose

Personalization is often used to provide an organization layer for users on top of real-time data. As Ken Fromm put it in his primer on the Real-Time Web:

"The Internet is shifting from discrete units of websites and Web pages to discrete units of information [...] organized in ways that are relevant and personal to each individual, using data gleaned from social graphs as well as recommendation and personalization services that allow users to set their preferences."

If you use a dashboard product like TweetDeck, Seesmic or Peoplebrowsr to use Twitter, then you're able to group people, keywords and topics. This is effectively personalization at work.

Open Web: More Data About You, Better Personalization

Another aspect of personalization is the increasing prevalence of open data on the Web. A lot of companies make their data available on the Web via APIs, web services, and open data standards. And as we discussed in the first post in this series, much of that data is structured - allowing it to be inter-connected and re-used by third parties.

How does open data lead to personalization? Simply put, the more data about you and your social graph that is available to be used by applications, the better targeted the content and/or service will be to you. There are non-trivial privacy issues about this, however the personalization benefits can be significant.

There are a whole host of open data standards on the Web now. They include:

• Data portability - taking your data and friends from one site to another.
• OpenID - portable identity; single sign-on.
• OpenSocial - Google initiative for social networks, enabling developers to create widgets with one set of code; MySpace a member, Facebook isn't.
• APML - growing 'Attention' standard; Your Attention Data is all the information online about what you read, write, share and consume.

Recommendation Engines

Many consumer products on the Web aim to recommend you things that you may like. A couple of years ago, Alex Iskold outlined what he saw as the 4 main approaches to recommendations:

• Personalized recommendation - recommend things based on the individual's past behavior
• Social recommendation - recommend things based on the past behavior of similar users
• Item recommendation - recommend things based on the item itself
• A combination of the three approaches above

Amazon is probably still the best example of recommendations on the Web, but an example of something new from 2009 was Netflix launching better personalization features in March. They included new taste preferences, allowing users to (for example) choose between movies that are romantic, suspenseful, or dark. Other additions included a personalized homepage and a feature enabling users to mix and match genres.

Conclusion

Personalization has shown slow but steady progress in 2009. It hasn't been as wild a ride as Structured Data or Real-Time Web, but we consider personalization to be a key facet of the evolving Web.

ReadWriteWeb's Top 5 Web Trends of 2009:

1. Structured Data
2. The Real-Time Web
3. Personalization
4. Mobile Web & Augmented Reality
5. Internet of Things

Image credit: davepatten

DailyPerfect hails from Estonia and is an incubator project of investment company Ambient Sound Investments (ASI), who we interviewed earlier this week on ReadWriteStart. DailyPerfect uses behavioral targeting to try and predict a user's interests, through what the company says is "an automated semantic analysis of publicly available information on the web." The company is also releasing an API.

Does it Work?

When you first enter the site, you're asked to enter your name into a textbox. Then you sit back and wait for the personalized news to come rolling in, based on your 'digital footprint.'

The topics that DailyPerfect thought I would like initially were a motley bunch. Some were correct, like 'web 2.0' and 'alternative music.' Some were broad enough to have little chance of not being correct, such as 'History' and 'Fiction.' But there were also some perplexing topics presented to me: for example 'Mining' and 'Benelux countries' (Belgium, Luxembourg or The Netherlands). However the site offers the familiar thumbs up or down beside each option, so you can train the system. The thumbs also apply to individual stories.

There are also options to follow people and websites, which is useful in this age of Twitter and blogging. With websites, you can import your OPML file of websites you subscribe to in your RSS Reader of choice. I entered my Google Reader OPML file, however it only seemed to include a random selection of my feeds.

The site is well designed and the stories were fairly relevant to me. However we can safely say that it's no Techmeme challenger. For one thing it doesn't bind the same story from different sources together, which may be Techmeme's enduring killer feature. Anyone can scan Techmeme and quickly find out what the trending stories are, and what sources either originated it or are the most popular links.

DailyPerfect, on the other hand, appears to select just one source for each story - and it's a mystery how that is done. I saw a few links each to Telegraph, Reuters, and Macworld; along with links to a smattering of blogs, including one ReadWriteWeb story. There was even a Techmeme link in there.

Conclusion: Not Perfect, Maybe Useful

I'm unconvinced by the claims of personalization, semantic analysis and other technical fandangery that DailyPerfect made in its PR. Many new web apps make these same claims, but the proof is in the pudding - and as of now I don't see anything particularly special about the content served up by DailyPerfect.

I can't honestly see myself continuing to use DailyPerfect. It's likely to join the long list of web apps I've tried once and then never came back to. Admittedly, that's probably because I'm an information hound that looks for (and needs, for my work) context in my daily news fix. DailyPerfect may well suit casual news readers who don't require a wide choice of news, but simply a well-picked selection of stories. The question is whether those types of readers want an automated solution like DailyPerfect (other options include the well-established Topix, or a site like PopURLs), or whether they want the human curation touch that aggregator news sites like Huffington Post and CNET offer.

News aggregation and filtering is a crowded field, and DailyPerfect is going to need to do more than throw around words like "personalization," "semantic," and "predictive" if they're to survive and thrive.

New Features: Taste Preferences, Personalized Homepages, Mix and Match Genres

Movie recommendations on Netflix, which are currently mostly based on your movie ratings, are one of the service's best features, and judging from what we have seen so far, the new taste preferences, which allow you to choose between movies that are romantic, suspenseful, or dark, for example, will make this experience only better.

The mix and match feature, too, will allow users to create a more personalized experience on the site, which is clearly the focus of today's update.

Netflix is rolling out these new updates to its over 10 million subscribers slowly, but Todd Yellin, Neflix's Director of Product Management, expects that all members will see them on their homepages within the next week.

Last night, Cooliris released a new set of features for its users. And while the functionality is interesting, the most compelling part of the release may the part they didn't mention: one of the new features may hold the key to a revenue stream for the company.

But for as simple as it sounds, it's the background image customization that holds the additional revenue potential for Cooliris - advertising revenue, but revenue nonetheless.

Click on the Cooliris "Discover" option, select "Sci-Tech," and you'll be greeted by a number of interesting photos sitting on a backdrop that advertises "Gears of War 2." The ad is obvious and yet unobtrusive. Within the photo stream, you'll also find images from the game that are paid placement ads.

Will a new ad unit in a rapidly softening ad market be the key to survival? Not likely. But it's a step in the right direction. And one thing is for sure: some revenue is always better than no revenue. Plus, it's safe to assume that this is only one of many ideas that Shashi Seth - the former head of YouTube monetization who joined Cooliris as Chief Revenue Officer in June - has up his sleeve.

If you haven't seen Cooliris yet, it's definitely worth spending a few minutes to experience it. Its visual landscape truly changes the photo browsing experience. In fact, for some, Cooliris is so compelling that it's the first thing they show non-technical folks for "Wow!" factor. To see it for yourself, visit CoolIris.

You've seen this done with church signs and parking tickets, but check out this particular manifestation of the personalization meme. I'm guessing that many of you will want to send it to friends and family. Hopefully at least 51% of you.

Feel the self-blame (and get some good laughs) via the MoveOn.org home page. Thanks to RWW team member Dionne Fox for finding this. I can only imagine what the Republican equivalent would look like.

The main feature of this new search interface - the ability to reorder search results at will - is decisively different from the rumors about a digg-style Google interface that tend to reappear regularly. In U Rank, your changes only appear to your friends and don't influence the overall search index.

The emphasis of U Rank is on collaboration and sharing. U Rank keeps a history of all your searches, but these are not shared by default. U Rank also allows you to create lists of search results by allowing you to copy a given search result to another search. You could, for example, create a list of personalized search results for a search term like "Best Digital Camera."

Definitely Still a Prototype

U Rank is clearly still a prototype. Search results take a long time to load, and some very basic user interface issues clearly still need to be worked out. There is, for example, no way to move a search result from the second search page to the first, and the interface for dragging and dropping items sometimes doesn't work well. To be really useful, it would also be helpful if you could organize your friends into groups, so that you can share your searches on lists more selectively.

However, this is also a very interesting experiment that takes search into a different direction by putting a lot of emphasis on social interaction. If your searches tend to be very broad, you would probably have to have a lot of friends to ever encounter an annotated or reordered result, but we can see how this new interface could be very useful if you are working in a team that is focused on a very specific topic.

With the new SmartSpace service from GoDaddy, anyone can create a personal web site which aggregates your activity from across the social web, combine that with other sources of news and information, and then create a personalized start page containing everything of interest to them. The service can also be used as a blogging platform with social elements like chat already built in. The idea is that you can use the SmartSpace platform to create the kind of site that's right for you, whether that's a social network of sorts, a traditional web site with social elements, a place to host your podcasts, or whatever else you want.

SmartSpace is designed to be easy to use, even for non-technical users. With a click of a button, you can grab content from sites like flickr, YouTube, Google News, Facebook, MySpace, or any other web site that offers an RSS feed.

You can even customize this content to your own personal preferences. For example, if you only want to see Flickr photos of lolcats, you can just type in "lolcat" in the tag field provided. Alternatively, you could select the RSS feed of a particular person's photos.

In addition to this dynamic content form across the social web, GoDaddy also makes available various pre-selected news feeds which you can add if desired. This content is categorized by subject, and is similar to the types of selections that many of today's personalized homepages offer.

Chat & Email

The Chat application lets you have online text conversations right on the site. With the included administrative controls, you can launch a room, invite users, ban users, and participate in both public and private chat sessions. Again, there's nothing technical involved in adding this to your page - the app is already set up and ready to use. All you have to do is make a few choices about how it's displayed and whether it's loaded by default when you log in.

Also, because SocialSpace users have purchased a domain name via GoDaddy, there's an option to set up email addresses using that name. The interface for doing so is much easier to manage than GoDaddy's usual UI for creating email addresses (an ugly and geeky interface). Here, you're basically able to push a button and set up multiple email addresses associated with your domain. The inboxes for these can then be added as widgets to your homepage.

Photo Albums

If you don't keep your images online with a web service like Flickr, you also have the option to make your SmartSpace an online photo album using the SmartSpace photo application. With this, you can upload photos from your computer and then share those photos both publicly and privately in albums that are added to your page.

Web Site and Blogs

For text-based content, you can choose to either add a web site or blog to your homepage. With these options, you can select from a number of pre-built templates to configure the site. Although not as robust a platform as WordPress, the blog will probably work fine for casual users who want to take advantage of the other elements of the SmartSpace service.

Just Another Personalized Homepage Or A New Type Of Social Network?

SocialSpace could be linked to some patent filings the company filed earlier this year which describe a web portal that functions as a social network aggregator. According to those filings, the aggregation could be done using login systems like OpenID. Although there's no mention of OpenID integration in the SmartSpace support documents yet, we hope that integration is something they plan to add in the future.

Still, even without OpenID, what GoDaddy has launched today is a viable competitor to the other personalized homepages out there like iGoogle, My Yahoo, Netvibes, etc. But GoDaddy's SocialSpace goes beyond what those sites offer in a number of ways. Although widgetized content like photos and RSS feeds can be added to nearly any start page today, GoDaddy actually lets you own a domain name, set up a blog or website and then easily, instantly turn it into a personalized social network that aggregates content from the social web and includes chat functionality for instant interactions with your friends.

Will SocialSpace kill MySpace and Facebook? That's highly doubtful, but it could be a nice aggregator for those looking to establish a web presence with minimal work. And because it's from GoDaddy, a household name thanks to their high profile TV commercials and ad campaigns, this move also represents what may be the final leap where "social media" fully crosses over to the mainstream use and acceptance.

More Info

Prices for SmartSpace start at $4.99/month for 2 months. From there, the prices are as follows: 12 mo: $4.74/month, 24 mo: $4.49/month, or 36 mo: $4.24/month. You can watch a short introductory video here. ]]>Discuss]]> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/godaddy_unveils_mainstream_social_web_aggregator.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/godaddy_unveils_mainstream_social_web_aggregator.php Products Mon, 13 Oct 2008 10:45:00 -0800 Sarah Perez In a brilliant move that's sure to make both newspapers and social networks around the web jealous, the New York Times and LinkedIn, the leading US social network for professionals, are announcing a content partnership tonight that could substantially increase the value for users of both sites. The announcement will be made at the top of the hour, but the integration is live now.

LinkedIn users are now being shown personalized news targeting their industry verticals on the Business and Technology sections of NYTimes.com and will then be prompted to share those stories will professional associates.

A number of other social networks and bookmarking services have "share this story" links on NYT stories, but it's unclear how much traction those links alone are getting. Last month we wrote about one of those services, social news site Mixx, that's still seeing fewer than 1 million unique visitors per month despite "share this on Mixx" buttons on a long list of the biggest news sites in the world, including NYTimes.com.

How much more compelling is this partnership? We think it's a lot more compelling; check out the screenshots below and imagine the feedback loop this could create between the NYT and LinkedIn. LinkedIn has 25 million registered users and the NYT sees 17 million + unique visitors per month, but the partnership will need none the less to introduce more people to LinkedIn in order to really be a home run. See this NYT page for an "introduction to LinkedIn." That's pretty classy, though it's unclear yet when that link will be displayed and when it won't.

We'll see how the recommendation process works; we hope it doesn't rely exclusively only on explicitly shared links, but we'll see. This certainly gets the mental juices flowing about any number of other integration and recommendation possibilities.

One question we have is about money changing hands. There has been extensive discussion around the web of late about LinkedIn using partnerships as a revenue source and it wouldn't surprise us if the NYT is paying for this integration. LinkedIn may not be a huge social network, but its user demographics are some of the most financially desirable in the world.

We expect to see more partnerships like this emerge, perhaps from a chastised Facebook attempting to relaunch its Beacon program in a more acceptable fashion.

"People bristle at personalization just for the sake of personalization," said Tiffany Barnett White, the professor who headed the research. Barnett White found that relevance was one important factor in increasing recipient interest, but ultimately it was the actual value being offered that made the lion's share of the difference in peoples' reaction. At a time when information overload is often being responded to by varying degrees of personalization, we believe this study is worthy of consideration.

What This Means

We would argue that this behavior is probably common in online communication in general. If your service is personalizing its messages to users for anything but a very good reason, it's probably a bad idea. Flickr's "welcome [username]" in various languages around the world is cool - but other forms of fake personalization are not. Now we've got the numbers to prove it.

We've written here about how we want to get RSS feeds from PR agencies, not just emails - but the pseudo personalized emails are pretty obnoxious. The most obnoxious are emails personalized with our competitors' names! (This happens at least once a week.) We also receive any number of other emails from online training services, conferences and others that include some personal information. Especially when this personalization tricks us into opening the email, then we really get angry at whoever sent us that email.

We are interested to know whether you, [Reader'sName], feel the same way - or if you are someone who uses this kind of personalization in your online communication and have seen different results.

Image from Beth Kanter

How It Works

Each tag  in Moody creates a corresponding playlist in iTunes, so you don't need to use the Moody app to play your color-coded songs, although you can. You can name these tags anything you want, like "Dance" or "Mellow" or "Rockin'," depending how how you decided to categorize your music. Tunes can be labeled while you're listening to music, so you don't have to sit at your computer for hours tagging - you can just do it little-by-little, over time.

However, for some people, their music collections are far too large to tag items one by one, so there is an option to download tags (moods) for their tunes from the Moody database (for Mac users only).

Your tagged music can be ported over to your iPod as playlists, or, if you want to actually make the tags visible in your iPod, you can choose to put the tags in the composer ID3 field instead of the app's default of the comment field.

Color Coded Web Radio

I found Moody's color-coding is very much reminiscent of the Musicovery web radio service where you can discover new music based on how you feel. At Muiscovery, color-coded songs and a "mood matrix" help you narrow down your musical preferences while you begin exploring new tunes in a visually appealing way. You use the  "mood matrix" chart to click on what mood you are in: energetic, dark, positive, or calm or anywhere in between. You can even select or unselect the boxes next to the various musical genres like rock, rap, latin, soul, etc. so you will only be presented with songs that match your preferred styles. The songs appear in a visual display where they float around the screen connected to each other based on their tempo and their positive or negative lyrics. The color-coding lets you easily see which songs are from which genre.

 This month, the team behind the Moody app, quietly launched an experimental online player of their own, which is more like what Musicovery offers, except a much simpler version.

The player itself looks just like the Moody app. It works by querying the Moody database to determine mood and then searches for the tracks using Seeqpod. Since the tracks are from all over the internet, the quality can vary from song to song. This web player is still very much in alpha, but fans of the uncomplicated Moody app will love it.

Oh, and in case you're curious, the team at Moody has figured out the color of love - you would think it's red,  but apparently it's more of a yellow/greenish color. Who knew?

The interface itself is slick, fast, and easy to use. By default, tiinker aggregates content from thousands of news sources and blogs and sorts them into the categories of arts & entertainment, business, health & lifestyle, opinion, politics, science, sports, technology, and world. The stories are selected for you completely automatically, no humans involved. This is the key difference between tiinker and the other social news aggregators out there. With tiinker, story selection is all about you and what you are into - you can't even cross-reference your selections with others like you or your friends. This is a personalized news service, not a social network.

The news stories are chosen for you based on a complex mix of analysis of what they're about, how much you're interested in similar topics, how long ago they were published, where in the world they come from, and other factors. Tiinker will also sometimes present what they call "lucky dip" stories which are chosen to broaden the range of news you see, by exploring new topics outside of your common interests.

Ranking stories is as easy as clicking on the "thumbs up" or "thumbs down" and will help train tiinker to learn your preferences. You'll see stories becoming relevant to you after you've rated only a few articles, but it may take a few more visits for tiinker to really know what you like. The algorithm is continually learning as you use it and will get better at choosing interesting stories over time.

When you "thumbs down" an item, the service eliminates those kinds of stories from your profile right away. You also won't see stories appear from categories you don't browse. However, if you make a mistake and accidentally rank a story incorrectly, a useful feature allows you to click the thumbs icon again to undo your selection.

Another unique option is the ability for service to email you stories if desired. Upon signup, you can select to have tiinker email you stories daily, weekly, or never. You can also change this option in your settings at any time. There's an RSS feed available for your stories, and if you are interested in what the masses are reading, you can check out the "Popular" page, which has a feed as well. If you want to narrow it down further, each category page has a personalized feed and a popular feed, too.

If you start running out of things to read, you can click the "only unseen stories" link to see all the stories that have never been displayed for you. You might surprise yourself and find something of interest here.

To mark stories and save them for later by, you click the book icon underneath the item, which will save it to your "Scrapbook," a section of the site that holds saved stories. Of course, there's a feed for this as well.

Tiinker looks like a great service to help you sort through the massive amount of news published daily and gives you a more personal alternative to sites like Digg.  However, advanced RSS users will probably still want to use their feed readers in order to maintain control over their news sources, perhaps only using tiinker feeds to supplement their current RSS list. Still, the service is a big step forward in the capabilities of machine learning and for that alone, it's worth a look.

Last April, we held a contest asking readers for their web 3.0 definitions. Our favorite came from Robert O'Brien, who defined Web 3.0 as a "decentralized asynchronous me."

"Web 1.0: Centralized Them. Web 2.0: Distributed Us. Web 3.0: Decentralized Me," he wrote. "[Web 3.0 is] about me when I don't want to participate in the world. It's about me when I want to have more control of my environment particularly who I let in. When my attention is stretched who/what do I pay attention to and who do I let pay attention to me. It is more effective communication for me!"

What O'Brien was getting at is basically what Kiss was getting at: personalization and recommendation. And that's the promise of the Semantic Web. The easiest way to sell the Semantic Web vision to consumers is to talk about how it can make their lives easier. When machines understand things in human terms, and can apply that knowledge to your attention data, we'll have a web that knows what we want and when we want it.

ReadWriteWeb contributor Sramana Mitra put it another way on this blog last February, when she said that web 3.0 will be about adding context to personalization. "Personalization has remained limited to some unsatisfactory efforts by the MyYahoo team, their primary disadvantage being the lack of a starting Context," she wrote. "In Web 3.0, I predict, we are going to start seeing roll-ups. We will see a trunk that emerges from the Context, be it film (Netflix), music (iTunes), cooking / food, working women, single parents, ... and assembles the Web 3.0 formula that addresses the whole set of needs of a consumer in that Context." Or in other words, web 3.0 will be about feeding you the information that you want, when you want it (in the proper context).

Of course, the versioning of the Internet is kind of silly, and probably shouldn't keep going, but it is a fun way to look to the future and predict what we might be coming our way. What do you think of Kiss's idea about web 3.0 being about recommendation and personalization?

The irresistible force is personalization. This is the key to productivity. Personalization technology cuts through the clutter and saves time. The firm that delivers personalized content sits at the top of the attention economy food chain; all other content is “drive-by commodity”. Personalization leads to relevancy in advertising; and loyal customers.

The immovable force is privacy. You cannot do personalization effectively without knowing an awful lot of information about an enormous number of people. The privacy backlash is building. Today it is only techies who are aware of the issue and where it is headed, but when mainstream users get spooked by a few more high profile cases, we will see consumer backlash and then, with politicians on the bandwagon, more regulation.

This will make a loud noise and will be messy; and in that mess will be big opportunities for entrepreneurs. VRM (Vendor relationship Management) may be a key part of this, which we'll explore in this post.

Photo: Doc Searls

People just got fed up with intrusive marketing. However, traditional direct mail will seem merely annoying compared to the intrusiveness of pitches that will seem to know precisely who I am, what I did yesterday and so on.

If there is any justification for that $15bn Facebook valuation (I don’t think there is, but that’s another story) it has to be based on the fact that the advertiser can know so much about you and all your friends, so that they can target incredibly precisely.

In the glorious world being presented by technologists, personalization will be so precise and so useful that nobody will question the privacy invasion. Yeah right -- that may be true by the time we get to Version 3.1. But well before then, we will get enough examples that are almost exactly right but wrong in some crazy, chaotic way, that it spooks and offends enough people to set the Blogosphere on fire. Then MSM will pick up on the story and then politicians and regulators will jump on board.

VRM: The Next Big Opportunity?

Yes, I know, the Attention Economy guys have been banging on about this for a long time and it all seems somewhat theoretical. The basic idea - that data about me is my data and I should be able to control it and benefit from who has access to it - is sound and resonates with people at a gut level. The problem is that the proponents have not yet come up with an alternative model that works in practice. Beyond a few people who live online, seeing the stream of stuff we look at online is about as interesting as watching paint dry. I once looked at my Google search history and it was “ok, now what?”.

There has to be a “show me the money” angle; either in cash, or more likely in productivity and cost savings. The model of paying people specifically to look at advertising is likely to catch lower income people with time on their hands - not the ideal target for advertisers.

It has been interesting to watch the thinking evolve:

1. CRM. That’s good, we can keep track of our interactions with customers.

2. One to One Marketing. Turned out to be a mirage. Mass marketers do segmentation. Genuine mass customization is years away. The front end for that is not hard, the back end is really, really tough and involves massive enterprise change.

3. Attention Economy. The basic issue around supply and demand (supply of content is exploding, demand is relatively static) is sound. Try explaining to somebody quite how this is different from “eyeballs” and what it means to them. Eyes tend to glaze over.

4. Intention Economy. Inferring Intention is why Google is valued at $200 billion. The trouble for the rest of us is: if Google has search all wrapped up, what is left as an opportunity?

Photo: christophercarfi

5. Vendor Relationship Management. Doc Searls, who’s thinking evolved through Attention and Intention, is leading the charge on this. To quote their front page:

“VRM, or Vendor Relationship Management, is the reciprocal of CRM or Customer Relationship Management. It provides customers with tools for engaging with vendors in ways that work for both parties.

CRM systems until now have borne the full burden of relating with customers. VRM will provide customers with the means to bear some of that weight, and to help make markets work for both vendors and customers ‚Äî in ways that don’t require the former to “lock in” the latter.

The goal of VRM is to improve the relationship between Demand and Supply by providing new and better ways for the former to relate to the latter. In a larger sense, VRM immodestly intends to improve markets and their mechanisms by equipping customers to be independent leaders and not just captive followers in their relationships with vendors and other parties on the supply side of the marketplace.

For VRM to work, vendors must have reason to value it, and customers must have reasons to invest the necessary time, effort and attention to making it work. Providing those reasons to both sides is the primary challenge for VRM.”

VRM is still at the conceptual, evangelizing phase. It has yet to be built into a real service that offers real value to both buyers and sellers. There is a real entrepreneurial opportunity here.

Get Ready for the Privacy Backlash

In some respects, this looks like the old idea of “Infomediaries” being recycled. That concept was first raised by John Hagel in 1997 in the Harvard Business Review. Recycling is a good thing. Sometimes the timing simply has to be right.

The timing will be perfect when the privacy backlash really hits. A smart entrepreneur can get ready in anticipation of that. Of course it may never happen, but betting against buyer power in the Internet age is seldom smart.

One key to VRM is ID authentication and that is a tricky subject. It is technically fairly simple. All you need is something like the numbered bank account system which records that ID #1234567 is actually Joe Q Public, male, date of birth, zip code and other details that Joe Q Public controls. The linkage between the two has to be totally secure. The bigger issue is who can be trusted as that Infomediary?

For people to feel genuinely comfortable with privacy, personal data must be a) decentralized (a P2P model or federated servers) b) as secure as possible from hackers. With the number of high profile cases already public, people won’t trust a central database even if the provider has all the best intentions regarding privacy; they can change their mind or their data can be stolen.

The other key is order aggregation. Much as we like to see ourselves as the center of the universe, sellers need volume and are not set up to manage a stream of customized orders. It's a lovely idea but it won’t happen, because the seller’s systems are not ready.

Order aggregation is also not new as an idea. Again the timing might be right as companies tear down their command and control systems and everything moves to a retail model. What is the Purchasing Department (who loves ya Baby?) other than an order aggregator?

Conclusion

This may play out first in B2B and professional markets before it happens in the broad consumer market, for the simple reason that transaction value per individual is higher.

I like VRM as a catchphrase. It is dead simple to understand. It is intuitively appealing to people. Can we say Vroom?

What do you think? Is VRM a viable model? Where could it play out first? What are the alternative models that can combine the benefits of both personalization and privacy?