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SocialPhysics.org

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Paul's Blog 

1. User Control

Users must have control over their profiles, preferences, interests, and relationships. Instead of each merchant silo (e.g. Hertz, Best Buy, etc.) controlling data about the user, the user must be able to choose if and when to make their data available to the merchant. Instead of "they own you," "you own you."

1. User data must be stored and managed by an independent service provider that operates entirely on behalf of the user.
   
2. In order for a user to trust their information service provider, an open marketplace of alternative operators must exist, and the user must be able to seamlessly switch providers at any time. 
3. To create this marketplace the fundamental technology must be open source and royalty free.

2. Social Commerce Groups

More than ever, consumers are turning to one another for advice and recommendations before buying a product or service. Consumer-generated reviews of products, ratings are trusted beyond the merchant's assertions. Advice-seeking and advice-giving consumers who share a common affinity form what we call a Social Commerce Group. The narrow, specialized context provided by a S.C. group makes it economical for the for many smaller boutique merchants to participate in a group.

A Social Commerce groups are similar to traditional groups at Yahoo, Google or MySpace. Traditional groups: are formed around shared interest; are created by anyone; anyone can join or leave at any time; profile data is shared among members; integrated email and/or IM tools are usually provided. Different from these, Social Commerce groups:

1. Enable both consumers and merchants to appear and interact as peers.
2. Define their own profile schemas, tags, roles and reputation measures.
3. Provide headless profile and relationship data unlinked to identifying identity data.
   
4. Are bound at runtime to a data hosting service provider.

3. Separation of Contexts

Each website, online community, and communications system provides a context for interaction. In each of these users have different personas, profiles and relationships. But only the user must be allowed access to the integrated "360" view of their information and relationships across contexts.

1. Two kinds of contexts: Identity data vs. Profile data contexts.
   
2. Profile data contexts use headless data. Or at least have user's identifier(s) (e.g. screen-name) must only identify them within their local context).
   
3. Users must control the release of cross-context associations (e.g. the fact that paul@socialphysics.org is the same person as "7b-dfs-ef-58-987" or "batman") in another context).
   
4. Easy to use tools must be provided to manage the user's presence in multiple contexts, with special care that only the minimal information relevant to a given context be stored.