Uno de Waal

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User Centric design and identity with Beacon

Uno as Identity, Online, Social Networks

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Nov|30|2007

Facebook Beacon has brought up a lot of issues - almost all bad of course.

What’s been happening with Identity 2.0 will hopefully solve this issue, and it also relates to personal information that other companies have. Jason from Bokardo started me on a thought process.

Personally, I have no problem with companies knowing my spending habits, but I want to know what spending habits they know. I want that to be transparent, and also changeable at any point. I want to have access to my user profile on Blockbuster (US example) and I want to know what data they are capturing. And this is for two reasons: I want to be able to see what dirt they have on me, and then I also want to be able to change that data so that Blockbuster can provide me with a better experience. In the case of movies, sometimes I rent only comedy’s, but I’m also actually interested in documentaries, specifically documentaries on street art and modern urban architecture and how public space facilitates discourse and society. But they don’t know that because they don’t stock it,  and I’ve never browsed/searched for it because I know they don’t stock it. If I can tell them this somehow (I can mail them, but who does that? For all my services?) then perhaps they would start stocking these movies.

Back to user centric design
This is perfectly solvable with APML. What does APML do?
It’s great. Here’s what it does:

APML allows users to share their own personal Attention Profile in much the same way that OPML allows the exchange of reading lists between News Readers. The idea is to compress all forms of Attention Data into a portable file format containing a description of ranked user interests.

That is exciting. APML is nothing else than your own piece of market research, but the great part is that it sits with YOU. Not Truworths, Stuttafords, NIKE or Facebook. These services inevitably only have a limited view on your attention - they only track your interactions with their own products. NIKE has an APML file for you, but it’s only for you using their products. Facebook Beacon was an attempt to aggregate all of this, and they are in a very good position to do this - they already have a very good profile of you, and now they’re starting to gather market intel on you.

Marshall Kirkpatrick has a pretty good argument behind how Google botched this up with their new Feed Recommendations. Why do I think? Because I didn’t have access to that Attention Profile that they have on me. I’m sure they have VERY good algorithms etc, but at the end of the day, me reading icanhascheezburger.com daily, every single update, doesn’t really mean that lolcats are high on my attention list - it’s only that one blog. And I think only I can tell you that.

It’s got 1565 of my RSS subscriptions, thousands of Gmail messages (32k unread ones, in fact), several Google Custom Search Engines, my GCal life history, search history and more I’m sure - all tied to my Google Account and all it can give me is 20 new sources?

Basically, I want to be able to control that data and construct my OWN profile, and know which sites know what from me. At the moment these attention silos are not being centered around the user, they are being centered around services that a user uses. Woolworths has a different profile of me than NIKE does, which is sometimes good, but they aren’t cross selling properly.

Back to OpenID and OAuth
Principles behind OpenID and OAuth aim to solve this. OpenID allows me to login to all these sites using a single sign on (in a strict sense of the word). OAuth allows me to tell these sites what I want them to know about me. So, I sign in to Flickr and it asks a bunch of details from me. I have already filled in all these details on my OpenID server, http://unodewaal.identitu.de. I then point Flickr to my OpenID server, telling it, get the details there. I then get asked on my OpenID server: Hey, Flickr is asking for a whole bunch of data of yours, what do you want to tell it? Name, Surname, Email, Country, Time Zone (cos that’s always a hack), etc etc.

All this data is transferred with a click of a button. But not only that, I can then manage what info Flickr has of me, from my OpenID server (not sure if Identitu.de can do this yet).

We’re trying to do this with Utterbuzz. You will have multiple profiles, on multiple sites, all managed from a single interface. So, you join a network for online dating, that has a specific profile that you play up (you’re taller, healthier, leaner, increased your salary by 10x and your breast by 3x), but you don’t want any of that data to cross over to the school network that you’ve joined. But it’s still managed in a central profile. Ning has done a similar thing with their profile management - it’s basic (you can set different profile pics for different networks), but it’s an idea.

OAuth is the technology behind all of this for standardizing the authentication process. Listen to this podcast on Oauth with Larry Halff, Eran Hammer-Lahav and Chris Messina for more:

Three of the minds behind the Oauth initiative join us to tell us about this emerging “open protocol to allow secure API authentication in a simple and standard method from desktop and web applications.”

Back to Facebook Beacon
I believe the Beacon experiment shows that users want this kind of transparency. They feel pissed off to know that Blockbuster and Starbucks might be sharing data via Facebook. But, if you knew what data they had, and you could control that data, would it be different? I believe it would. Every time I access Amazon, it asks me: “Hey Uno, I have no idea what books you like. Do you want to give me access to your APML data?” I say yes, and I flag my APML manager to “Always allow Amazon Access” so that I don’t have to do this all the time. I also say, “Only give Amazon access to this data, not the other. They don’t need to know that.”

When I browse Amazon they create a profile set for me, kept on their servers. I want that kept on my server, or at least have access to that file, because when I go over to Blockbuster, I can say: “Hey Blockbuster, I’ve been looking at these books, do you have any similar movies?” And Blockbuster spits them out. I then flag Blockbuster as: “No, I don’t want to give Blockbuster permanent access or allow them to keep my data” because I’ve heard that they resell data to spammers. Also, I don’t want to let all my friends now about the products I’ve bought, that option should sit with me.

At the end of the day Dave Winer says it best:

Long-term, however they both have problems because advertising is on its way to being obsolete. Facebook is just another step along the path. Advertising will get more and more targeted until it disappears, because perfectly targeted advertising is just information. And that’s good!

If Facebook Beacon went the way that OpenID is going then we would have better Attention Data and we would all be better off.

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