As you’ll see, Thomas’ infographic shows the current size of major social networks as well as the other well-known online services we use on a daily basis relative to their peers. It also overlays the present size of each company’s mobile user base. You’ll see Skype, Facebook, Twitter, Gmail, MySpace, LinkedIn, and more. You can also check out the agency’s infographic from last year to see the relative changes. Notable differences include: The rise of Chinese Qzone and Twitter, the fall of Myspace, and the stasis of Friendster.

Some other notable trends in the geosocial universe, courtesy of JESS3:

• Mobile: 5.3 billion mobile devices are used worldwide — that’s 77 percent of the world’s population
• Smartphones: 21.8 percent of all mobile devices are smartphones. Despite what one might think, Apple does not top the list in sales—Nokia does
• Skype: Mobile usage continues to increase thanks to Skype’s wise investment in apps and its mobile platform
• Facebook: Now tops 629 million registered users with almost 250 million people accessing the site via mobile
• Qzone: China’s version of Facebook, Qzone, is experiencing supernova-like growth with 480 million registered users
• Twitter: Broke the 200 million registered user mark with nearly 40 percent of people tweeting via mobile
• Email: Hotmail still dominates email, but Gmail is gaining fast
• Yelp: Yelp is topping 50 million unique visitors per month. Its move to team up with OpenTable earlier this year will only increase its relevancy
• Foursquare and Gowalla: These geosocial specialists are still growing, but growth seems to be slowing down a bit

At least, that's what I would have told you before yesterday, when the rumor emerged that Delicious will soon be shut down by Yahoo!, which bought the company from its founder in 2005. Given the source and Yahoo's decision to refrain from comment, the rumor is now widely taken as fact. And it's a fact that should trouble every user of the social web.

On the face of it, Yahoo! is well within its rights to shut down the delicious service. With more than 5 million users to serve and somewhere over 180 million bookmarks to store, the cost of running the Delicious servers alone must be mighty fierce. And that's before you factor in the cost of keeping the system secure, ensuring regular upgrades, introducing the features that keep Delicious relevant (like the ability to post bookmarks to Twitter) and offering even the most minimal response to customer inquiries. What do we users pay for the privilege of keeping our bookmarks online and accessible from any Internet-connected computer, 24/7? Not a thing.

Not a cent, anyhow. But we're contributing in other ways. Every time I store a bookmark in Delicious, I'm giving the system another piece of information — a record that someone has found this web page useful enough to hold onto. Every time I tag (assign a descriptive keyword to) a bookmark, I'm telling Delicious a little more about what this web page covers, as well as something about how the keyword(s) I chose relates to all the other keyword(s) other people have used to describe the same page. Every time I store an excerpt or description along with my bookmark, I'm enhancing the site's ability to serve up tidy summaries of its millions of pages. And every time I save a bookmark that somebody else has stored, too, I'm identifying a point of common interest between me and that other user.

You might call that point of common interest a relationship. And for many Delicious users, those relationships are a key benefit to using the bookmarking system. In the early days of Delicious, I kept track of the other people who (like me) were storing bookmarks with the tag "e-democracy"; some of these turned into trusted colleagues. While searching for other people using Delicious to organize their professional networks, I discovered Marnie Webb, who had introduced the use of the nptech tag into the community of nonprofit technology users; Marnie became a client and a friend. Marshall Kirkpatrick wrote yesterday about how Read Write Web identified the Delicious users who were early bookmarkers of emergent technologies and key information, and followed those users as a way of identifying breaking stories and trends.

Those relationships, as much as the bookmarks themselves, represent a common asset. Yahoo! doesn't own the relationships among its users, any more than a party host owns the relationships among her guests. We've placed those relationships in trust, along with the information about which websites we find useful enough to store, and which keywords we use to describe them. We contribute the content and relationships; Yahoo! contributes the software and servers.

It's the bargain that underpins much of the social web. Twitter gives us 140 characters worth of storage and a killer API, and we fill it up with our latest thoughts and experiences. Foursquare gives us a nice way of converting GPS locations to actual intuitive locations, and we give it the scoop on where we hang out. Facebook gives us a way to connect with friends, and we tell it who we know and what we have to say to them.

This bargain amounts to the world's most ambitious marriage of public and private value creation. On the one hand you've got private companies trying to monetize their social networks and web apps, generating at least enough revenue to keep the lights on. And on the other hand you've got individuals who voluntarily engage in the social production of common value: people who contribute the video, text, photos, tags and links that together create collective value that is far greater than the sum of its parts, and far more compelling than the software or servers on which it resides.

It's that collectively created value that distinguishes today's social web from previous generations of on- and offline media. The essence of a web 2.0 service, as Tim O'Reilly put it many years ago, is that it gets more valuable as more people use it. He wasn't talking about how a company's market valuation increases as its user base goes up (though that happens, too); he was talking about the value we jointly create by using a service that networks and combines our contributions.

While that value is created collectively on Delicious, only Yahoo! can decide whether it keeps growing or is abruptly flushed away. The company has an array of choices that could allow it to keep its end of the bargain. It could charge users for a premium level of service, the way it does on the photo site Flickr; if Yahoo! can offer unlimited photo storage for $25/year, presumably it can store (much tinier) bookmarks at a comparable price. It could sell Delicious to another company; the only imaginable reason to shut down instead of selling is to avoid offering a competitive advantage to another company, in a truly egregious example of placing competition ahead of customers.

If it sounds like I'm taking the Delicious news personally, that's because Delicious is where I first fell in love with Web 2.0's potential to create value through network effects. I stored my first bookmark on October 14, 2004, on the day I wrote my very first blog post. A 2005 article I wrote about Delicious for the Toronto Star helped me get on the radar of the incipient web 2.0 blogosphere, and was crucial to establishing our company, Social Signal. Since then I've written countless blog posts about different ways to use Delicious, evangelized Delicious to thousands of people in successive web trainings, and integrated Delicious RSS feeds into many social media monitoring dashboards and websites, including our own. For a long while I even wore my Delicious tag cloud on my laptop. I still feel thrilled when someone says to me — as someone did just a few weeks ago — that learning about this service was the highlight of a weeks-long social media training. Sometimes I feel like my whole social media career is just an outlet for the Delicious evangelism that could be equally well-served by doing demos on a street corner, busking with a wi-fi-connected computer and an open laptop case.

All that passion — all those bookmarks! — add up to an investment that amounts to a far bigger commitment than the purchase of Yahoo! shares. A Yahoo! shareholder can dump their stock tonight (and may well, judging from the online reaction to the Delicious rumor), and reinvest in another company tomorrow. For Delicious users, it's not so easy: I may be able to export my bookmarks, but it will be much harder to re-establish all the tag subscriptions, work flows and shared knowledge collections that I built up in collaboration with other delicious users.

The investment of users like me is what makes Web 2.0 fundamentally different from Web 1.0, the one that saw its investors disappear in a giant cloud of smoke when the dot-boom bubble burst. The Web 1.0 boom was based on an old standby, perceived shareholder value. The web 2.0 boom is based on something that is, in principle, much more durable: user-generated value.

But it's only durable if users continue to trust that their contributions to Delicious, and to other social media sites, will be received in good faith. Good faith means that when a company decides it can no longer sustain its community of users, it does its best to preserve the value they have created by giving the community its best possible shot at a new business model, a new owner or a new home. Yahoo!'s silence on the subject of the Delicious rumor speaks volumes about its commitment to the platform, and to the users who have been the greatest contributors to its growth.

So yes, go back up your bookmarks. But know that you're only backing up a portion of the value you've created as a Delicious user. The far greater value — the value you've created by networking your knowledge with other users — remains in Yahoo!'s custody. How they handle it will send a powerful signal about how companies conduct the other kind of Web 2.0 valuation: the valuation of user contributions.

At least, that's what I would have told you before yesterday, when the rumor emerged that Delicious will soon be shut down by Yahoo!, which bought the company from its founder in 2005. Given the source and Yahoo's decision to refrain from comment, the rumor is now widely taken as fact. And it's a fact that should trouble every user of the social web.

On the face of it, Yahoo! is well within its rights to shut down the delicious service. With more than 5 million users to serve and somewhere over 180 million bookmarks to store, the cost of running the Delicious servers alone must be mighty fierce. And that's before you factor in the cost of keeping the system secure, ensuring regular upgrades, introducing the features that keep Delicious relevant (like the ability to post bookmarks to Twitter) and offering even the most minimal response to customer inquiries. What do we users pay for the privilege of keeping our bookmarks online and accessible from any Internet-connected computer, 24/7? Not a thing.

Not a cent, anyhow. But we're contributing in other ways. Every time I store a bookmark in Delicious, I'm giving the system another piece of information — a record that someone has found this web page useful enough to hold onto. Every time I tag (assign a descriptive keyword to) a bookmark, I'm telling Delicious a little more about what this web page covers, as well as something about how the keyword(s) I chose relates to all the other keyword(s) other people have used to describe the same page. Every time I store an excerpt or description along with my bookmark, I'm enhancing the site's ability to serve up tidy summaries of its millions of pages. And every time I save a bookmark that somebody else has stored, too, I'm identifying a point of common interest between me and that other user.

You might call that point of common interest a relationship. And for many Delicious users, those relationships are a key benefit to using the bookmarking system. In the early days of Delicious, I kept track of the other people who (like me) were storing bookmarks with the tag "e-democracy"; some of these turned into trusted colleagues. While searching for other people using Delicious to organize their professional networks, I discovered Marnie Webb, who had introduced the use of the nptech tag into the community of nonprofit technology users; Marnie became a client and a friend. Marshall Kirkpatrick wrote yesterday about how Read Write Web identified the Delicious users who were early bookmarkers of emergent technologies and key information, and followed those users as a way of identifying breaking stories and trends.

Those relationships, as much as the bookmarks themselves, represent a common asset. Yahoo! doesn't own the relationships among its users, any more than a party host owns the relationships among her guests. We've placed those relationships in trust, along with the information about which websites we find useful enough to store, and which keywords we use to describe them. We contribute the content and relationships; Yahoo! contributes the software and servers.

It's the bargain that underpins much of the social web. Twitter gives us 140 characters worth of storage and a killer API, and we fill it up with our latest thoughts and experiences. Foursquare gives us a nice way of converting GPS locations to actual intuitive locations, and we give it the scoop on where we hang out. Facebook gives us a way to connect with friends, and we tell it who we know and what we have to say to them.

This bargain amounts to the world's most ambitious marriage of public and private value creation. On the one hand you've got private companies trying to monetize their social networks and web apps, generating at least enough revenue to keep the lights on. And on the other hand you've got individuals who voluntarily engage in the social production of common value: people who contribute the video, text, photos, tags and links that together create collective value that is far greater than the sum of its parts, and far more compelling than the software or servers on which it resides.

It's that collectively created value that distinguishes today's social web from previous generations of on- and offline media. The essence of a web 2.0 service, as Tim O'Reilly put it many years ago, is that it gets more valuable as more people use it. He wasn't talking about how a company's market valuation increases as its user base goes up (though that happens, too); he was talking about the value we jointly create by using a service that networks and combines our contributions.

While that value is created collectively on Delicious, only Yahoo! can decide whether it keeps growing or is abruptly flushed away. The company has an array of choices that could allow it to keep its end of the bargain. It could charge users for a premium level of service, the way it does on the photo site Flickr; if Yahoo! can offer unlimited photo storage for $25/year, presumably it can store (much tinier) bookmarks at a comparable price. It could sell Delicious to another company; the only imaginable reason to shut down instead of selling is to avoid offering a competitive advantage to another company, in a truly egregious example of placing competition ahead of customers.

If it sounds like I'm taking the Delicious news personally, that's because Delicious is where I first fell in love with Web 2.0's potential to create value through network effects. I stored my first bookmark on October 14, 2004, on the day I wrote my very first blog post. A 2005 article I wrote about Delicious for the Toronto Star helped me get on the radar of the incipient web 2.0 blogosphere, and was crucial to establishing our company, Social Signal. Since then I've written countless blog posts about different ways to use Delicious, evangelized Delicious to thousands of people in successive web trainings, and integrated Delicious RSS feeds into many social media monitoring dashboards and websites, including our own. For a long while I even wore my Delicious tag cloud on my laptop. I still feel thrilled when someone says to me — as someone did just a few weeks ago — that learning about this service was the highlight of a weeks-long social media training. Sometimes I feel like my whole social media career is just an outlet for the Delicious evangelism that could be equally well-served by doing demos on a street corner, busking with a wi-fi-connected computer and an open laptop case.

All that passion — all those bookmarks! — add up to an investment that amounts to a far bigger commitment than the purchase of Yahoo! shares. A Yahoo! shareholder can dump their stock tonight (and may well, judging from the online reaction to the Delicious rumor), and reinvest in another company tomorrow. For Delicious users, it's not so easy: I may be able to export my bookmarks, but it will be much harder to re-establish all the tag subscriptions, work flows and shared knowledge collections that I built up in collaboration with other delicious users.

The investment of users like me is what makes Web 2.0 fundamentally different from Web 1.0, the one that saw its investors disappear in a giant cloud of smoke when the dot-boom bubble burst. The Web 1.0 boom was based on an old standby, perceived shareholder value. The web 2.0 boom is based on something that is, in principle, much more durable: user-generated value.

But it's only durable if users continue to trust that their contributions to Delicious, and to other social media sites, will be received in good faith. Good faith means that when a company decides it can no longer sustain its community of users, it does its best to preserve the value they have created by giving the community its best possible shot at a new business model, a new owner or a new home. Yahoo!'s silence on the subject of the Delicious rumor speaks volumes about its commitment to the platform, and to the users who have been the greatest contributors to its growth.

So yes, go back up your bookmarks. But know that you're only backing up a portion of the value you've created as a Delicious user. The far greater value — the value you've created by networking your knowledge with other users — remains in Yahoo!'s custody. How they handle it will send a powerful signal about how companies conduct the other kind of Web 2.0 valuation: the valuation of user contributions.

Paper money does not have intrinsic value

Paper money has no intrinsic value. The word “Intrinsic” means: something that belongs to the essential nature or constitution of something else. The ‘intrinsic brightness of a star’ is a common definitive statement.  Synonyms of the word include: built-in, constitutional, hardwired, immanent, indigenous, integral, inherent, natural, etc.

“Society” is intrinsic to economics

The Bank is an important institution for vetting social value. Despite the observation where it seems money is created out of thin air, traditionally a bank looks into a community of people and their talents to identify “social value”.  This is the likelihood that a person or group of persons can execute a specific economic outcome in the community.  Then the bank provides them with a tool called money to represent and facilitate future productivity in the present time.  So it is not really “thin-air” – it is simply invisible social value.

Little Bank on the Prairie

In the old days, the banker was a member of the community and could judge social value on any number of intrinsic social characteristics such as social status, leadership, family values, education, personal habits, and community participation. Later, the credit score became a proxy for social value through the analysis of public data (where “public” became the proxy for “social”). The credit score was then assumed to convert social value directly into financial value.

The terms “proxy” and “intrinsic” are not the same thing.

“Brightness” is not a proxy for stars any more than “stars” are a proxy for brightness.  Yet, the distinction between intrinsic banking and proxy banking remains indistinct. An Intrinsic bank would be characterized where social value is intrinsic to the creation of financial value.

It’s all about Value

We created The Value Game as a new class of business methods to transform financial value back into social value – The Value Game performs the mirror-image effect in an economy as the credit score.  The value game increases the social value of the community enterprise by converting monetary value into social value.  Only then can the Credit Score sustainably convert social value back into financial value.

Who wants to become a Trillionaire?

The point of this discussion is not to slam banking, rather, it is to demonstrate that intrinsic banking does not formally exist – yet is must exist as a direct balance to traditional banking.  As such, intrinsic banking is at least as “Valuable” as the banking industry itself. Today we are entering an age where society MUST come up with a NEW way to store and exchange VALUE. Whoever really get’s this and pioneers Intrinsic Banking today (what it means, what it creates, and why) will become as mega-wealthy as traditional bankers, in the future.

Paper money does not have intrinsic value

Paper money has no intrinsic value. The word “Intrinsic” means: something that belongs to the essential nature or constitution of something else. The ‘intrinsic brightness of a star’ is a common definitive statement.  Synonyms of the word include: built-in, constitutional, hardwired, immanent, indigenous, integral, inherent, natural, etc.

“Society” is intrinsic to economics

The Bank is an important institution for vetting social value. Despite the observation where it seems money is created out of thin air, traditionally a bank looks into a community of people and their talents to identify “social value”.  This is the likelihood that a person or group of persons can execute a specific economic outcome in the community.  Then the bank provides them with a tool called money to represent and facilitate future productivity in the present time.  So it is not really “thin-air” – it is simply invisible social value.

Little Bank on the Prairie

In the old days, the banker was a member of the community and could judge social value on any number of intrinsic social characteristics such as social status, leadership, family values, education, personal habits, and community participation. Later, the credit score became a proxy for social value through the analysis of public data (where “public” became the proxy for “social”). The credit score was then assumed to convert social value directly into financial value.

The terms “proxy” and “intrinsic” are not the same thing.

“Brightness” is not a proxy for stars any more than “stars” are a proxy for brightness.  Yet, the distinction between intrinsic banking and proxy banking remains indistinct. An Intrinsic bank would be characterized where social value is intrinsic to the creation of financial value.

It’s all about Value

We created The Value Game as a new class of business methods to transform financial value back into social value – The Value Game performs the mirror-image effect in an economy as the credit score.  The value game increases the social value of the community enterprise by converting monetary value into social value.  Only then can the Credit Score sustainably convert social value back into financial value.

Who wants to become a Trillionaire?

The point of this discussion is not to slam banking, rather, it is to demonstrate that intrinsic banking does not formally exist – yet is must exist as a direct balance to traditional banking.  As such, intrinsic banking is at least as “Valuable” as the banking industry itself. Today we are entering an age where society MUST come up with a NEW way to store and exchange VALUE. Whoever really get’s this and pioneers Intrinsic Banking today (what it means, what it creates, and why) will become as mega-wealthy as traditional bankers, in the future.

It became clear to me as I watched the digital economy in 2010 that we had passed a tipping point and moved into a new age of technology use. For lack of a better term, let's call this the Cloud Era. But this age is about much more than the migration of infrastructure, data, and applications up into the ether (even though, as I and many others have argued, this is a huge and exciting development). The Cloud Era is about the cloud, and also about three other fundamental trends in computing that became unmistakable in 2010. These are:

Social Computing, (or Web 2.0, Enterprise 2.0, social business, or whatever else we might want to call it). Emergent social software platforms are here to stay; they'll be part of the fabric of our personal and professional lives from now on. Over the past few years, some very clever technologists have rolled out varieties of digital connective tissue that satisfy our deep urges to communicate, form networks, express ourselves, keep in touch with others, play games, and get work done.

Some of these have been stunningly successful. Facebook has more than 500 million active users. 25 billion tweets were sent in 2010. Groupon, a 2 year old company, turned down a $6 billion acquisition offer. And so on. These examples show how much we want to follow E.M. Forster's century-old advice: "Only connect!... Live in fragments no longer."

Technology Delight. We now expect the hardware and software we use to be appealing, intuitive, and powerful, all at once. Remember when you needed to be a master of Boolean logic in order to find what you were looking for on the Web? When most user interfaces were about as welcoming as a tax form? When user experiences called to mind Job's experiences?

You might remember them because they were the norm until pretty recently, but advances like Windows 7, the Google search box, and the iPad are rapidly changing our expectations. We used to anticipate a fair amount of frustration when we used technology. Now we expect at least a bit of delight. This is a big shift, and one that should make us happy. In fact, our technologies might make us too happy. Because they're both appealing and social, they're addictive. The panel I moderated at the 2010 Boston Book Festival left me a little shaken. William Powers, Nick Carr, and Eric Haseltine all agreed that today's technologies are so compelling that we can get lost in them for hours, drifting in The Shallows instead of thinking deeply. Technology delight is a fantastic development, but we should keep in mind the dangers of too much of a good thing.

Scientific Organizations. We sit on truly astonishing amounts of data, and have massive computing horsepower with which to analyze it. This means we can more rigorously test more ideas and hypotheses than has ever before been possible. We don't have to rely so heavily on conventional wisdom, lore, abstract theories, or HiPPOs (the Highest Paid People in the Organization). Instead, we can rely on the tools of the scientific method — data, analysis, rigorous thinking and hypothesis testing, experimentation, simulation, and so on — to understand the state of the world, link cause to effect, understand what will work, and make better decisions.

2010 saw computers that play Jeopardy! well and cars that drive themselves down busy city streets. These are triumphs of the scientific method. I'm not worried that computers are going to become self-aware and rise up against us, but I would be worried about a company whose leaders thought that their deep experience and keen intuition were better guides than any box programmed by pencil-necked geeks. Step by step, in domain after domain, the geeks are inheriting the Earth.

None of these trends is just a blip, and none is close to running out of steam. And as I look around companies and talk to their leaders, I see that most organizations are only just beginning to understand and exploit them. This implies a great deal of both opportunity and risk in the years ahead, with tons of innovation and more intense competition. Entering the Cloud Era should be a central part of the strategy for companies that don't want to be left behind in 2011 and beyond.

Data portability is defined as the ability to “bring your identity, friends, conversations, files and histories with you, without having to manually add them to each new service.”

Does this really solve the most important issue that users face when spelunking the depths of the social networking space?

This is the fundamental defect with the notion of data portability on the closed Web. The duplication of a user’s data across multiple networks.

While it’s great that a user has the flexibility, the freedom, even the right to take their data with them, in effect they are not taking anything with them. Users are not actually porting anything from one site to another. Porting implies the moving of an entity from one location to another, the transferring of data from one machine to another.

In reality, data portability is about giving users the freedom and ability to grab a copy of their current dataset and paste it into yet another data silo. They are not actually moving their data as much as copying it from one silo to another. So, their data is now duplicated across multiple locations.

The data silo (the social network) from which the data was copied (“moved”), does not delete the content—often even after a user requests the deletion of their account. Why? Because a member’s data, the content, is one of the most important business assets the social network owns. It is their key competitive advantage.

This is the fundamental defect with the notion of data portability on the closed Web. The duplication of a user’s data across multiple networks makes it even harder for a given user to control their identity, privacy, and Web presence.

What most people call a Web identity is simply an identifier. The true representation of an individual on the Web is what I describe as the set of all their identity graphs.

I don’t want my personal data exported, copied, replicated throughout the Web. I am for data redundancy where it’s efficient and necessary, but exporting a copy of my dataset (or subset) from one social graph to another does not make sense. You are duplicating your effort. You are splitting up–or more accurately duplicating part of–your identity graph into little pieces and then strewing them into different locations, placing them in multiple, closed data silos.

Don’t get me wrong. I am for true data portability. I’m just not in favor of the way it is currently implemented by the few participating social networks.

What I am proposing is a step beyond data portability that is even more user centric, that could make the Internet a truly open space, that would help usher in the Social Web.

What is Identity on the Web?

Before introducing my concept, it’s important to understand a key difference between my views of Web identity and the mainstream definition.

The commonly-accepted definition of a Web identity is a digital representation of a user. It is one of many possible personae that an individual may have on the same social network or among all the networks in which a given person participates. But I believe this definition discounts the individual in the equation.

In my article, Thinking Outside the Privacy Box, I discuss my philosophical views about identity on the Web. In short, what most people call a Web identity is simply an identifier. The true representation of an individual on the Web is what I describe as the set of all their identity graphs.

Enter Identity Flowability

In our service-centric Web-2.0 world of social networks where each new service is in effect a closed data silo, data portability is an important issue. What I’m suggesting is that the next focus of the Social Web should be to obviate the need for data portability.

Instead of data portability, the Social Web needs to champion the concept of Identity Flowability. Identity Flowablility is the easy movement and control by a user over their identity graph.

Identity Flowablility enables a user to store any part of their identity graph in the places that they choose and then allow other sites to reference that data from those places—not copy the data from those places. Data would be semantically marked up to facilitate their auto discoverability for sharing between other sites. Access rights could easily be assigned.

WebIDs could become the cornerstone in the user-centric Social Web.

Thus the concept of Identity Flowablility is to provide each user with an easier, more efficient, and effective mechanism with which to control their entire IdentitySpace. It creates a user-centric container through which data content and privacy rights could be better managed and controlled.

How would this concept change the Social Web? Instead of the quantity of users a site has being its most valuable, monetizable asset, the true value proposition of each Web 3.0-enabled company would be the quality and uniqueness of their service. No longer would a large membership base necessarily equal a big asset as smaller, more nimble niche-market players could compete by offer superior services.

WebID: Helping to Flow and Control Identity

There is a very promising identification protocol that goes a long way toward creating the foundation of a flowable identity. It’s called WebID—in particular, a FOAF+SSL WebID. If you are interested in identity flowability, I encouraged you to learn more about WebIDs and how they could become the cornerstone in the user-centric Social Web.

Related Articles

1. Web 3.0: Powering Startups to Become Smartups
2. Repackaging the Promise of the Social Semantic Web
3. Regaining Control of Privacy and Identity: It’s up to Each Individual
4. A Flock of Twitters: Decentralized Semantic Microblogging

Also See

For an interesting, possible alternative to today’s closed-siloed Web, visit the Consortium for Local Ownership and Use of Data. Their task is challenging but in tune with my sentiment expressed above.

Data portability is defined as the ability to “bring your identity, friends, conversations, files and histories with you, without having to manually add them to each new service.”

Does this really solve the most important issue that users face when spelunking the depths of the social networking space?

This is the fundamental defect with the notion of data portability on the closed Web. The duplication of a user’s data across multiple networks.

While it’s great that a user has the flexibility, the freedom, even the right to take their data with them, in effect they are not taking anything with them. Users are not actually porting anything from one site to another. Porting implies the moving of an entity from one location to another, the transferring of data from one machine to another.

In reality, data portability is about giving users the freedom and ability to grab a copy of their current dataset and paste it into yet another data silo. They are not actually moving their data as much as copying it from one silo to another. So, their data is now duplicated across multiple locations.

The data silo (the social network) from which the data was copied (“moved”), does not delete the content—often even after a user requests the deletion of their account. Why? Because a member’s data, the content, is one of the most important business assets the social network owns. It is their key competitive advantage.

This is the fundamental defect with the notion of data portability on the closed Web. The duplication of a user’s data across multiple networks makes it even harder for a given user to control their identity, privacy, and Web presence.

What most people call a Web identity is simply an identifier. The true representation of an individual on the Web is what I describe as the set of all their identity graphs.

I don’t want my personal data exported, copied, replicated throughout the Web. I am for data redundancy where it’s efficient and necessary, but exporting a copy of my dataset (or subset) from one social graph to another does not make sense. You are duplicating your effort. You are splitting up–or more accurately duplicating part of–your identity graph into little pieces and then strewing them into different locations, placing them in multiple, closed data silos.

Don’t get me wrong. I am for true data portability. I’m just not in favor of the way it is currently implemented by the few participating social networks.

What I am proposing is a step beyond data portability that is even more user centric, that could make the Internet a truly open space, that would help usher in the Social Web.

What is Identity on the Web?

Before introducing my concept, it’s important to understand a key difference between my views of Web identity and the mainstream definition.

The commonly-accepted definition of a Web identity is a digital representation of a user. It is one of many possible personae that an individual may have on the same social network or among all the networks in which a given person participates. But I believe this definition discounts the individual in the equation.

In my article, Thinking Outside the Privacy Box, I discuss my philosophical views about identity on the Web. In short, what most people call a Web identity is simply an identifier. The true representation of an individual on the Web is what I describe as the set of all their identity graphs.

Enter Identity Flowability

In our service-centric Web-2.0 world of social networks where each new service is in effect a closed data silo, data portability is an important issue. What I’m suggesting is that the next focus of the Social Web should be to obviate the need for data portability.

Instead of data portability, the Social Web needs to champion the concept of Identity Flowability. Identity Flowablility is the easy movement and control by a user over their identity graph.

Identity Flowablility enables a user to store any part of their identity graph in the places that they choose and then allow other sites to reference that data from those places—not copy the data from those places. Data would be semantically marked up to facilitate their auto discoverability for sharing between other sites. Access rights could easily be assigned.

WebIDs could become the cornerstone in the user-centric Social Web.

Thus the concept of Identity Flowablility is to provide each user with an easier, more efficient, and effective mechanism with which to control their entire IdentitySpace. It creates a user-centric container through which data content and privacy rights could be better managed and controlled.

How would this concept change the Social Web? Instead of the quantity of users a site has being its most valuable, monetizable asset, the true value proposition of each Web 3.0-enabled company would be the quality and uniqueness of their service. No longer would a large membership base necessarily equal a big asset as smaller, more nimble niche-market players could compete by offer superior services.

WebID: Helping to Flow and Control Identity

There is a very promising identification protocol that goes a long way toward creating the foundation of a flowable identity. It’s called WebID—in particular, a FOAF+SSL WebID. If you are interested in identity flowability, I encouraged you to learn more about WebIDs and how they could become the cornerstone in the user-centric Social Web.

Related Articles

1. Web 3.0: Powering Startups to Become Smartups
2. Repackaging the Promise of the Social Semantic Web
3. Regaining Control of Privacy and Identity: It’s up to Each Individual
4. A Flock of Twitters: Decentralized Semantic Microblogging

Also See

For an interesting, possible alternative to today’s closed-siloed Web, visit the Consortium for Local Ownership and Use of Data. Their task is challenging but in tune with my sentiment expressed above.

I have been approached by many brilliant social entrepreneurs in recent weeks.  They each have several things in common. Each has an incredibly creative idea and a strong passion linked to a deep seated observation that social currency has value.  As nebulous as that may sound, it is very real, specific, and clear in the minds of those who I’ll call, The New Entrepreneur.

Nothing Economic can happen until two or more people get together to build something.  Likewise, when two or more people get together to build something, economic things happen. The objective of this post is to demonstrate the 3 underlying actions of a new class of business plans that will become dominant in the next economic paradigm.

Our recipe is simple:

Step one: convert financial currency into social currency

Step two: Create value denominated in social currency

Step three: Convert new social currency back into financial currency – if needed

This simple recipe forms the basis of the business plans for several start-ups including Social Flights and The Social Value Network as well as numerous other projects that we consult to in the US, Greece, Brazil, Australia, China, and Mexico.

So here is how it works

The Old Business Model:  Suppose you buy a truck and you use it to haul stuff for your own personal and business interests. After 5 years, you can sell the truck for about 1/2 what you paid for it.

The New Business Model: Suppose that you buy a truck to hauls stuff for your own personal or business interests.  Suppose that you also let The Boy Scout troop leader borrow it to pick up christmas trees for sale.  Suppose you let the Kiwanis use it to pick up supplies for their annual salmon bake.  Suppose you let the YWCA haul donated furniture to their satellite facility.  Suppose you help your neighbor use it for a home improvement project.  After 5 years, you sell the truck for about 1/2 of what you paid for it.

The difference is that now your community is engaged with your personal interests.  You have converted financial capital into social capital and created new value denominated in social currency.  One notable example includes Neighborgoods, but there will undoubtedly be thousands of variations of this leveraging every conceivable physical asset.

Now, how do you transform this back social capital into financial capital?   Well, that’s what the emerging science of Social Capitalism is all about.  Social Profit is like a fungible option with a face value.  If structured correctly, an option can have a face value equal to the difference between discount and full price. That face value can be traded like money.  When you are engaged in a community, people know who you are, they trust you and they share with you.  People are trading options – the right without the obligation to exercise a financial position in the future.

Options have real value as an asset if you have them or as a liability if you don’t

I have been approached by many brilliant social entrepreneurs in recent weeks.  They each have several things in common. Each has an incredibly creative idea and a strong passion linked to a deep seated observation that social currency has value.  As nebulous as that may sound, it is very real, specific, and clear in the minds of those who I’ll call, The New Entrepreneur.

Nothing Economic can happen until two or more people get together to build something.  Likewise, when two or more people get together to build something, economic things happen. The objective of this post is to demonstrate the 3 underlying actions of a new class of business plans that will become dominant in the next economic paradigm.

Our recipe is simple:

Step one: convert financial currency into social currency

Step two: Create value denominated in social currency

Step three: Convert new social currency back into financial currency – if needed

This simple recipe forms the basis of the business plans for several start-ups including Social Flights and The Social Value Network as well as numerous other projects that we consult to in the US, Greece, Brazil, Australia, China, and Mexico.

So here is how it works

The Old Business Model:  Suppose you buy a truck and you use it to haul stuff for your own personal and business interests. After 5 years, you can sell the truck for about 1/2 what you paid for it.

The New Business Model: Suppose that you buy a truck to hauls stuff for your own personal or business interests.  Suppose that you also let The Boy Scout troop leader borrow it to pick up christmas trees for sale.  Suppose you let the Kiwanis use it to pick up supplies for their annual salmon bake.  Suppose you let the YWCA haul donated furniture to their satellite facility.  Suppose you help your neighbor use it for a home improvement project.  After 5 years, you sell the truck for about 1/2 of what you paid for it.

The difference is that now your community is engaged with your personal interests.  You have converted financial capital into social capital and created new value denominated in social currency.  One notable example includes Neighborgoods, but there will undoubtedly be thousands of variations of this leveraging every conceivable physical asset.

Now, how do you transform this back social capital into financial capital?   Well, that’s what the emerging science of Social Capitalism is all about.  Social Profit is like a fungible option with a face value.  If structured correctly, an option can have a face value equal to the difference between discount and full price. That face value can be traded like money.  When you are engaged in a community, people know who you are, they trust you and they share with you.  People are trading options – the right without the obligation to exercise a financial position in the future.

Options have real value as an asset if you have them or as a liability if you don’t