some thoughts on Facebook Connect and VRM

Granted, its (VRM) not a new idea...but 2 key things have changed to make it feasible: consumer culture and online behavior have shifted and 2) the technology is (getting) there...its exciting especially with all of the open standards work that that Brad Fitzpatick and crew are working on (and of course the VRM project of Doc Searls that focuses on creating VRM based on an open framework).

What it is interesting with FB is what they're up to with Facebook Connect...on the surface it seems fine and dandy and great...great for users and great for participating 3rd party sites. But i can't help but feel like FB has some sinister long term plan to be a VRM system of sorts...not adopting open standards and the ethos of VRM, but rather attempting to be a closed data storage hub that feeds sites and services within the FB universe via FB Connect...you could have a seemingly "data ubiquitous" experience (and thereby create a POTENTIALLY VRM-like system using FB data and the entire Connect network of sites and services whereby there could be a value exchange between consumers and suppliers) under an AOL-like FB Connect world, but in reality it would just be a massive, closed system which maintains its proprieter status of user data, rather than that data being owned by the users themselves (hence a bastardized version of VRM).

The Future is VRM post

Its no secret I'm a bonafide Cluetrain drunk. I didn't just sip that Kool Aid, I killed it. And really, any foray into social strategy is Cluetrain-light on training wheels. The concept of VRM ought really to resonate with most of those already espousing the open, social Web. My first introduction to the concept of VRM was several years ago when I ran into Fred Davis in San Francisco who, among other topics, discussed his dot com-era venture, The Lumeria Project (and well, I suppose before that it really began after reading The Cluetrain Manifesto in college--it came out my junior year of high school). The LP was essentially a VRM platform that for obvious reasons never made it past the first few rounds of financing. Not only was user behavior online not ready for such a venture (and really, the general culture at large), but the Web was not ready. Now, we're getting there. Of course, Doc Searls has been heading up ProjectVRM, headquartered at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, where he is a fellow, for quite some time now.

So, an intro to VRM as put together by the VRM Hub group headed by Adriana Lukas in the UK:

Imagine being able to take charge of your information and data, notes and records about past transactions, your purchase history, future plans and ideas, preferences and knowledge about areas of your life. At the moment you are the last person to be able to benefit from all this accessible only via various platforms. Your ‘digital detritus’ is not yours, it is information that others harvest and use for their own purposes. Imagine to be able to do that with the same ease as checking email, posting to a blog, adding a bookmark to del.icio.us, searching Google, commenting on an article, uploading a photo to Flickr, managing your google or ical calendar, leaving a review on Amazon, adding an application on Facebook. All this whilst protecting your privacy to the degree you find comfortable, sharing your activity or data as you wish, not as mandated by the platform providing some functionality in exchange for your data (Facebook, Amazon etc).

Imagine having your customers share with you what they like, want and think of you. At the moment, you are dependent on market research, which is like looking through a keyhole at the rich ‘user-generated’ world. Imagine being able to relate to your customers, consistently and persistently, where they contribute directly to your supply chain where it makes sense - whether it is R&D, product design, distribution and marketing. Interaction with them is modular, intuitive and user-driven freeing much of your resources spent on marketing and transaction cost.

The above is part of the vision of the Project VRM. The name stands for Vendor Relationship Management and it originates from ‘flipping’ CRM - customer relationship management. Project VRM is a community-driven effort to support the creation and building of VRM tools. The project is headquartered at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University and headed by Doc Searls, a fellow with the center. The project is building a framework that sets standards and protocols for a category of tools that enable individuals and organizations to relate and transact on more equivalent terms. By minimizing the leverage and control one party has over another in a (typically commercial) relationship, individuals and organizations can instead focus on creating and sharing value. The VRM opportunity is not rooted in us vs. them emotionally-driven arguments but in creating a more efficient and balance relationship between business and their customers, markets and companies, demand and supply.

What’s in it for the individual?
The ability to manage and analyze your data will give you better knowledge about yourself, the kind of knowledge that is the holy grail of most companies’ customer data management. The awareness of your preferences, understanding of your needs will help you to articulate them easier and strengthen your position with vendors.

What’s in it for businesses?
We live in an increasingly decentralized world with more customer choice, yet vendors continue to fiercely collect and control customer data and exploit the opportunities therein. The ultimate goal of VRM is better relationships between customers and vendors, by considering and constructing tools that put the customer in control of their data and ultimately their relationships with other individuals, companies and institutions.

Benefits of ‘letting go’ of customer data:

1. Customers share the burden of storing and protecting the data - eases compliance, privacy & security concerns
2. Increased access to information about customers - direct benefits to the customer to share more data rather than less.
3. New services from previously unavailable access to customer data

via

Where are the FB Connect Partners?

With FB Connect set to "officially" launch November 30th, 24 out of the 26 original launch partners have still yet to integrate FB Connect. Whats the hold up? According to sources at TechCrunch, they're apparently waiting to see how it all flys (as was to be exepcted, I'm sure). With buggy implementation and a fear of policy changes, most of the launch partners have opted to take the approach Japan has taken with GMOs...watch the guinea pigs and wait it out a while. Alas, but in the meantime you can get your fix tinkering around with logging into 3rd party sites with your FB credentials here (be sure to take the quick CNN survey about FB Connect) and here and here (after you've logged in with new credentials on mybarackobama.com, you can then connect with FB). Cheers.

what's the social graph got to do with it?

What's The Social Graph Got To Do With It?

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: social graph)

Hey [Redacted],

In regards to your questions around the deck:

The deck has a lot of voice over that goes with it...but i wanted to strike a balance between clarity and brevity as its going on slideshare and needs to function as a stand alone (a lot of the data portability geeks will know what the cloud and the mircoformats are so i didn't want to be redundant). FOAF and XFN are microformats for expressing relationships between people online (vs. proprietary markup that say FB or MySpace uses). The "Cloud" can be described as distributed, interlinked virtual servers where data can be stored instead of within proprietary, dedicated hardware, thus decentralizing where personal data is stored. this is the vision of the likes of Brad Fitzpatrick (invented the FOAF and XFN microformats) and the Data Portability Workgroup and the likes of Doc Searls in creating a silo-less, open, semantic Web that functions like a VRM (vendor relationship management).

You could almost think of the Cloud as the "meta-web"...if the internet freed documents from device, the Cloud frees data from device and it becomes permanently cached on the internet (rather than any one server). Right now our data on FB is stored on FB servers. For all intense and purposes, they maintain control over our data. So right now, the "data portability" initiatives like FB Connect, while a step, are still lacking. Its still FACEBOOK granting permission to access OUR data to third parties rather than the end user accessing and granting permissions....

Anyway, this is a favorite topic of mine, and one that has been around since the birth of the net (and there have been a few failed attempts at creating this VRM such as the Lumeria Project back in '96)...anyway, if you want to read about it, there are of course super smart peeps (the ones actually making it happen) to turn to: http://www.vrmlabs.net/vrm-in-a-nutshell/

So, the point of the deck was that while a lot of this geeky stuff is still a ways off, marketers are usually 2 years behind developments in the Web and technology. I wanted to float some of what has been a discussion within the tech community for the past few years. That we are seeing open strategies from the major networks is only indicative of the momentum this movement is gaining and that the realization of a silo-less, open and fully semantic Web is not just a pipe dream after all....

Also, this is not a "the future is VRM" deck...its much more basic and simpler than that (and mainly sticks to talking specifically about FB Connect as an example).

hence too this picto-post i did: http://www.thewebissocial.com/2008/10/on-future-of-data-portability.html


cheers,
alisa