vendor relationship management

One potential USP for Diaspora

July 3, 2010 By Dan Thornton Leave a Comment

I’ve been following the progress of Diaspora since it started – in the midst of Facebook’s last privacy problems, four young programmers at NYU asked for funding to create ‘a privacy aware, personally-controlled, do-it-all distributed open source social network’.

And they got a lot more funding than they asked for – before they’d written a line of code, their Kickstarter page raised over $200,000. And they’d originally set a goal of $10,000. Backers even include Facebook’s founder and CEO, Mark Zuckerberg!

They’ve just posted their one month update, and things seem to be going well. But in the midst of writing a post on 140char, something struck me.

The big worry about Diaspora is that even if it’s finished, available, and a great service – not enough people will necessarily care enough about privacy etc to sign up and get critical mass to it.

So what about taking a different route.

Advertisers and marketers are increasingly using social networks as a primary route for reaching consumers effectively.

Revenue generation is increasing for the social networks and companies using them.

Customer service and CRM are following along slightly behind.

So why not make the unique selling point to the average user something slightly different – why not make Diaspora the first social network to serve as a platform for Vendor Relationship Management?

With Diaspora, not only could you control all your own data from a privacy point of view, but you could control all your own data from a VRM point of view – selecting what you might want to release to a company, and how long you’ll allow it, whilst it’s relevant.

It could be the social network which doesn’t let you ‘Like’ a company – but lets you control your relationship with all the companies you’d like to do business with. And with the open source and distributed, open approach to data, it could be made easy for consumers and companies to hook up using Diaspora as a platform and channel, rather than having to be within the social network itself.

Maybe that would give both movements more leverage?

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Filed Under: open source, social networks, Vendor Relationship Management Tagged With: crm, diaspora, facebook, kickstarter, open source, social networking, vendor relationship management, vrm

Google Buzz proves problems with single online identities

February 24, 2010 By Dan Thornton 1 Comment

I’m assuming most people have been caught up in the huge amount of discussion around Google Buzz, the new social sharing and conversation tool from Google which surprised a lot of people by suddenly appearing as a full release within Gmail, and again by having some serious privacy problems at launch, which Google has had to work hard and fast to rectify.

But I think the launch of Google Buzz has simply highlighted the inherent problems with the move towards a single profile and identity for each internet user, whether that ends up being controlled by Google, Facebook, or an alternative service. Particularly as Google tested the system internally, where everyone had a Gmail account and several of the public problems just never arose.

1. Security: Almost everyone has encountered a scam or phishing attempt by email or a social network. There’s no way to eradicate these entirely, and a single identity which is then linked out to every other internet location would be a valuable prize for phishers. Seperate logins encourage you to use seperate passwords, so if one acocunt is compromised you’ll be able to alert people and still get on with most things – For example, my online email is backed up elsewhere, and contacts are replicated between Gmail and LinkedIn, so I could get the word out if problems occurred. Stalking also becomes a lot easier if everything is linked to one central location.

2. Embarrassing Content: This doesn’t have to just mean naughty pictures, although if you’re of legal age then I have no problem with you using the internet how you like. But it can also mean drunken photos and comments, or perhaps surprise presents or events being organised online which end up being discovered. The rule of thumb is to never publish anything online that you’d mind anyone seeing, even if it’s behind the thin veneer of a privacy setting, but we’d all still like to have some illusion of control over whether our boss discovers the pictures of our last night out, and we certainly wouldn’t want to ‘cross the streams’ and inadvertently shove it in front of him or her.

3. Different tools for different things, and added hassle: I’m a slight edge case here as I use several work accounts in addition to my own on a lot of networks, but even within my house, there is a shared computer which has at least two profiles used on the same site. Switching accounts suddenly becomes a real hassle – for instance, Youtube now automatically logs me in with my Google Profile, forcing me to log back out and then in again as Absolute Radio or OGS Labs.

4. Anonymity can be a good thing: Obviously this crosses over with the security and embarrassment issues, but not every anonymous person is a troll or 4Chan prankster. Take Wikileaks as an example of the positives that can come from anonymity.

5. Dependancy: Most people are combining email and social networks in varying amounts now, but if your email and social network ids are combined and potentially based in the cloud, any loss of access will leave you completely stuck. Or if your profile is removed for any reason, whether it’s a mistake or justified removal by whichever company controls all of your details…

But maybe there is a solution.

The people discussing Vendor Relationship Management hold the secret. Let me own some software – ideally Open Source, which is stored locally on my own devices, and then allows for the initial interaction with networks and service providers. And potentially have a mirror of certain elements of that software which is securely stored online somewhere that is also owned entirely by me. And that online element can then be differentiated into each of my personal and work profiles allowing me to quickly and easily switch between them, and not cross the identity streams. Companies would be able to access the particular information I wish to share with them, and use of that system would be a key part of digital education, which would implicitly educate people about privacy and sharing issues.

The only problem with this is who would store that info online – would you trust the Government of your country any more than Google, Facebook or Amazon?

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Filed Under: Digital Culture Tagged With: google buzz, logins, online identities, privacy, profiles, security, single sign in, vendor relationship management, vrm

Why Twitter won’t replace Google search- but will overtake it

February 16, 2009 By Dan Thornton 4 Comments

The reason why Twitter and real-time information will overtake Googl e search isn’t because of the aggregation of the ‘Thought stream’ as Techcrunch has proposed, as Lew Moorman has written, or even as Robert Scoble has written.

For some reason, we still think that a new service will totally replace the old, and that the two compete on the same field, even though Robert’s post alluded to where I see the real advantage for real-time information.

Google provides signposts for where you want to go. Twitter provides you with a guided tour by your friends.

Signpost by JMC_Photos on Flickr (CC Licence)

It’s not about searching the aggregate of real-time information.

It’s about asking the members of your network in real-time for responses.

And it’s about increasingly moving towards Vendor Relationship Management, rather than Customer Relationship Management.

I don’t care as much about the general consensus of the population of Twitter about a subject as often as I care about the opinions of the core group of my 2300 followers on the specific question I’ve posed.

And that’s where the threat to Google occurs. As a normal Twitter user, I’ll occasionally look at what the general populace reports around breaking news or a major event. But it’s the closer network within my followers who provide the real value of responding in minutes, or even seconds, to my requests and questions.

It allows people (and one day, perhaps companies), to come to me with the information I need, rather than setting out on my own to try to navigate my way to what I need.

Real-time web allows me to ask for information and have it brought to me by my core group of contacts and relevant people/companies. That’s the real-time benefit – not in evolving search.

But this doesn’t mean that there is no need for search.

Guided Tours by friends don’t remove the need for signposts, for example when friends aren’t available.

I’m already finding that I use search far, far less than ever before.

Real time search is only really valuable when there is a need to guage public opinion for businesses, marketeers, journalists, writers etc. (the last two refer to print, web, blog, tv, radio, mobile).

So trust me to choose search, questioning friends, or real-time search when it’s appropriate for what I want to do, and don’t rip up all the singposts in case I don’t know anyone in a particular town!

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