Category: Scenarios (Page 4 of 6)

Creating a market force

January 18, 2009 / / 6 Comments

So I’ve been asked (somewhere… can’t find it right now, so maybe one of ya’ll will remind me) if the last three paragraphs of this post by Daniel Goleman speak in some way to VRM. Here they are:

The singular force that can drive this transformation of every manmade thing for the better is neither government fiat nor the standard tactics of environmentalists, but rather radical transparency in the marketplace. If we as buyers can know the actual ecological impacts of the stuff we buy at the point of purchase, and can compare those impacts to competing products, we can make better choices. The means for such radical transparency has already launched. Software innovations now allow any of us to access a vast database about the hidden harms in whatever we are about to buy, and to do this where it matters most, at the point of purchase. As we stand in the aisle of a store, we can know which brand has the fewest chemicals of concern, or the better carbon footprint. In the Beta version of such software, you click your cell phone’s camera on a product’s bar code, and get an instant readout of how this brand compares to competitors on any of hundreds of environmental, health, or social impacts. In a planned software upgrade, that same comparison would go on automatically with whatever you buy on your credit card, and suggestions for better purchases next time you shop would routinely come your way by email.

Such transparency software converts shopping into a vote, letting us target manufacturing processes and product ingredients we want to avoid, and rewarding smarter alternatives. As enough of us apply these decision rules, market share will shift, giving companies powerful, direct data on what shoppers want — and want to avoid — in their products.

Creating a market force that continually leverages ongoing upgrades throughout the supply chain could open the door to immense business opportunities over the next several decades. We need to reinvent industry, starting with the most basic platforms in industrial chemistry and manufacturing design. And that would change every thing.

It’s certainly consistent with VRM. And the first four words of the last paragraph are exactly what we expect VRM to do.

Answering tweeted questions about VRM

November 20, 2008 / / 2 Comments

So, with the help of vangeest and Twitter Search for #vrmevent, I’m addressing questions tweeted from the virtual floor here at the VRM Event in Amsterdam. Here goes…

vangeest: @dsearls: retweet @vangeest: #vrmevent: what is the relationship between the good old B2B marketplaces like Ariba and VRM?

As an idea VRM owes something to B2B, for the simple reason that B2B relationships tend to be between equals. Thus they can be rich and complex as well. B2C tend to be simplified on the B side, mostly so maximum numbers of templated Cs can be “managed”. Iain Henderson has talked about how there are thousands of variables involved in B2B VRM, while only a handful with CRM, which is B2C.

VRM essentially turns B2C into a breed of B2B — to the degree that both terms no longer apply. VRM equips individuals to express their demand in ways that B2C never allowed, and B2B never included.

But VRM is not a site, or a marketplace. That makes it different from Ariba, eBay, or online marketplaces. VRM may happen inside of those places, but VRM is not about those places.

Most importantly, VRM is not something that companies give to customers. It’s something customers bring to companies.

zantinghbozic: #vrmevent ichoosr: vrm is socialism 2.0 – http://mobypicture.com/?pcg0qr

This reports a provocative tease by Bart Stevens of iChoosr in his opening slide. I don’t agree with the statement, but his deeper point rings true: it involves a shift in power in the marketplace, from producers to consumers. Except I wouldn’t use the word consumers. I’ll explain that later.

Building the Intention Economy

September 14, 2008 / / 6 Comments

VRM is part of the Intention Economy I first wrote about here. The gist:

The Intention Economy grows around buyers, not sellers. It leverages the simple fact that buyers are the first source of money, and that they come ready-made. You don’t need advertising to make them.

The Intention Economy is about markets, not marketing. You don’t need marketing to make Intention Markets.

The Intention Economy is built around truly open markets, not a collection of silos. In The Intention Economy, customers don’t have to fly from silo to silo, like a bees from flower to flower, collecting deal info (and unavoidable hype) like so much pollen. In The Intention Economy, the buyer notifies the market of the intent to buy, and sellers compete for the buyer’s purchase. Simple as that.

The Intention Economy is built around more than transactions. Conversations matter. So do relationships. So do reputation, authority and respect. Those virtues, however, are earned by sellers (as well as buyers) and not just “branded” by sellers on the minds of buyers like the symbols of ranchers burned on the hides of cattle.

The Intention Economy is about buyers finding sellers, not sellers finding (or “capturing”) buyers.

So here’s SpringWise, telling us about , and its new service . Not sure it’s a breed of VRM, but since it’s in the same Intention marketplace, I thought it was worth a mention.

The buyer’s envelope, please

August 26, 2008 / / 9 Comments

Sitting here talking with Tara about her new VRM business. Lots of helpful ideas bouncing around. So we’re both pausing in the midst to write stuff down. Here’s my brain dump of the moment, with some actionable ideas toward the end…

For retailing, the Net changes everything. But it’s still new. It’s three seconds after the Big Bang and all we have are a few light elements, a lot of heat and no galaxies. Yet $billions are already being made in online retailing, and$billions more are being spent and saved by retailers and shoppers using the Net to advantage. And because of those $billions, and the successes of companies like Amazon and Zappos, and services like Google Checkout and Orbitz, we’re inclined to think this stuff is mature. It isn’t. It’s still embryonic and protean, compared to what it will become.

In the meantime, consider this thesis: Amazon and other excellent online retailers have improved the online shopping experience as far as a retailer can. Yes, there is always room for improvement, but there is only so much improvement you can carry out only on the sell side, even if you’re equipping buyers to do a better and better job. At a certain point the improvements need to happen on the buy side. You need better buyers, not just better sellers. You need to improve the tools available to buyers — tools that help buyers with all sellers, and not just within each seller’s walled garden or silo.

Therefore… At a certain point the problem is no longer scale but scope.

Amazon and its competitors are pushing out the envelope of sell-side scope. On the buy side we’re just getting started. The envelope is still mostly empty. The job of VRM is to start pushing out its walls, starting at close to zero.

Another way of putting it. There is only so much any retailer can do, because they are sellers and not buyers.

Still another: It doesn’t matter how big you make a walled garden if it’s still a walled garden. At a certain point you reach the Multiple Walled Garden Problem. (Shall we call it MWGP? Or SO for Silo Overload?)

If you’re carrying a pile of retailer loyalty cards, you have a silo overload problem. It may not be a huge one for you, but it’s still a problem. It’s friction, and not just for you. Loyalty cards can be a PITA for the seller as well. They require multiple pricings, slow things down at the cash register, and involve piles of often wrong and irrelevant data. But I don’t want to go into how good or bad loyalty cards are here, because they’re beside a larger point: that we need to start solving market problems from customer’s side, by improving the scope of what the customer can do in the same way with multiple vendors.

For example, take affiliate programs, or affliliate marketing. Tara has been schooling me about these things, which are a huge part of how online retailing works. Hell, I didn’t even know that when I clicked on an a Head Butler link such as this one, Jesse Kornbluth gets a kickback (or at least puts himself in a position for one) from Amazon.com. He’s not just pointing to a book. He’s part of a new retail system in which commissions or kickbacks (or whatever you want to call them) are silo’d. Amazon has one kind and other retialers have other kinds. Some have none. Whether he means to or not, Jesse discriminates against those, and does so for financial reasons.

From the sellers’ side this is all fine in the sense that it’s a free (and fee, I suppose) marketplace. Every retailer is at liberty to compete by providing the best kickback system.

But what if the customer wants, say, purchasing guidance that’s uncontaminated by bias toward one kickback system over another? What if the intermediary guides the customer to a seller that doesn’t have a kickback program, and the intermediary gets nothing from the sale while the seller gets everything? Wouldn’t it be better to have the buyer (or the intermediary, on behalf of their buyers, and for the good of the marketplace) assert a single form of commissioning that’s fair and helpful to all sellers and all intermediaries — even while respecting the kickback (or commissioning) systems that are already in place?

This is a greenfield here. Let’s think and talk about it.

Also, let’s think about what kind of research project this might make — or that the theses presented here might make — for a business school student or class (at HBS or elsewhere). Because that’s one of the things I’d like to do in the next school year, which is just getting started.

VRM linkage and thinkage

May 31, 2008 / / 3 Comments

In Vendor relationship management: CRM threat or opportunity?, Graham Saad lays out the customer and vendor side advantages of VRM.

John Cass adds to Francine Hardaway’s report on the talk I gave yesterday at There’s a New Conversation. Note my comment in response to Francine’s post as well.

In My Request to Give, Bart Stevens asks about a relbutton scenario:

It could look something like this:

“… I have 2 laptops and 100 USD which I would like to give to a school in Africa …”
Now this is communicated to the smaller NGO’s which now will have “to compete” for these goods.

By doing so, they (the NGO) start to create a new (and hopefully) a more sustainable relationship with the donor.

What do you think, would this idea fly, or is the NGO community to closed, or not ready yet?
And do you know some NGO’s I could contact to discuss the nuts and bolts of such a platform?

Let me know. I want to see such a platform work.

There is a (hopefully) productive back-and-forth between Simon Edhouse, myself and others in response to this post here. For context read Simon’s The Media is the Mess, where he locates a central problem of silos (such as Facebook) in the legacy client-server architecture of the Web, and commercial modeling that has become so deeply associated with The Web that its polycentral model has become normative, and at odds with the Net’s peer-to-peer roots and nature. I believe Simon mischaracterizes VRM as something operating within that model (or typical of it), but I like many of his thoughts about the model itself. As Adriana points out in her analysis of  ‘user-driven’ vs. ‘user-centric’, there are risky mentalities and framings at play, often when we don’t know it.

In If I Ruled the Internet, Molly Metzger correctly calls for poetry as well as code, if we are to make clear what VRM is all about. I have a comment below her post.

VRM post-iCitizen linkage and coverage

May 23, 2008 / / 11 Comments

A lot went down at conferences these last two weeks. The main three were IIW, Berkman@10 and iCitizen. Many of the below items were from the iCitizen, where my keynote met with much face-to-face approval and enthusiasm, but the blogging and twittering veered toward the skeptical side (not negative, but more wait-and-see). That’s what you’ll see below.

We also have a ‘con coming up at Harvard for VRM folks on July 9-10.  I’ll have more details about that shortly. Meanwhile, read the items below and follow the links. My own reactions follow those.

In a long and important post titled From misapprehensions to alternatives, Adriana Lukas begins, ” I’d like to put the record straight about where ‘Feeds Based VRM’ comes from and what the Mine! is and what it isn’t.” I can’t find any section short enough to quote further, but I highly recommend reading the whole thing.

From Is VRM a phenomenon? by Alan Mitchell:

VRM is not just a ‘phenomenon’ generated by placing cool tools in the hands of users. Yes, of course, we need cool tools (it may not happen without them). But we also need new types of service, and new types of business models to make these new types of service possible. It’s about all three, together.

The danger with the ‘VRM is a phenomenon’ argument is that it encourages us to focus on just one of these pillars and to ignore the other two. If we do, we will never create a stable, scalable platform – and VRM risks being still born.

From Data portability, privacy and personal data stores, by Nick Brisbourne:

The personal data store might be an existing service like Facebook (or even LastFM) or a new service created specifically to form this function. And different people might choose to use different applications as their hub.This model of a personal data store where the user allows different service to access the data on a fine grained persmissioned basis has a lot in common with the VRM vision of how advertising might evolve.

Tom O’Brien reporting from iCitizen:

Doc Searls – sure, he’s one of the authors of The Cluetrain Manifesto – the book directly responsible for me having the idea for MotiveQuest – and a true visionary – but did you know he has at least 7 electronic devices running at all times? I was sitting behind him watching and that guy can multitask! Great presentation (we tipped sacred cows in Ohio) and I especially appreciated the part about project VRM – which will change how we consumer stuff – and move us from a marketing based economy to a relationship/intention based economy. Thanks to his simple visual – the Relbutton – I finally understand the concept behind Project VRM!

From iCitizen – OpenSource Communications Channels?, by Andrea Hill:

Doc Searls (co-author of the Cluetrain Manifesto) is speaking at iCitizen about Open Source and Vendor Relationship Management. This is one of only a few sessions I’ve actually been able to attend, and it ended up being quite tech-heavy. Great for me! The idea is about how we can change our perspective on how to manage relationships. Doc (do we call him “The” Doc?) focussed on the role of technology in this matter. We extolled the virtues of open source technology to meet user needs.

He spoke of the VRM (vendor relationship management) work he has been doing at Harvard. The icon or symbol is the relbutton, which looks like two magnets attracted towards each other. The two negotiate a contract based on some as-yet-undefined terms. He mentioned Open Social a few times, and the idea that the user should be in charge of his own data. A good example: when we go to a doctor’s office, we are responsible to manually input our history. Each time we have to regurgitate information, we risk inaccuracies. He gave a statistic of how many people died of “misinformation” every year. So what if this was data we could carry with us?

I was interested in the language we would use to define these relationships – it made me think of established interfaces. There are two parties, how do we negotiate the languge we use to communicate? APIs are getting quite popular, but this is obviously on a much larger scale. He spoke frequently of Open Social, which I will admit I don’t know much about. My thoughts were moreso focused on microformats, the idea of describing our relationships with parties.

After the session I was talking to David Griner, and his thoughts on the matter seemed to be more related to the notion of privacy than openness. Indeed, this entire notion is called “Vendor management”, are we forgetting about the needs and expectations of the consumer? Doc mentioned that the individual was in charge of this data (the whole data portability notion that is de rigueur right now), and then there was also mention of the need for a 3rd party.

Doc is approaching this challenge from a tech standpoint, and I fear that this was a bit of a barrier to many of the folks in the room. It was a good presentation with regards to a potential challenge, but I think the need therefore isn’t entirely established as of yet. I think it’s also an interesting topic in the light of all the social networks data portability announcements that have occured in the past week. Who owns our data, do we really have the power to take it with us, and perhaps most importantly, what is that data? Some of us are experiencing social media fatigue, and I think there was some question from the user perspective if this required an additional level of “data management”. Do I need to define a profile to carry with me to specific sites, or do I establish an online persona that comes with me as I negotiate the web generically? How do we protect that information? Certain services like kaboodle offer us a place to aggregate products related to a certain user task (shopping). Perhaps this needs to be not about data, but about tasks.

From Advergirl‘s (Leigh Householder‘s) iCitizen Wrapup:

Jump back 5 years. If around that time, someone had started talking about carrying all your music, pictures, and movies on a device that both fit in your pocket and worked as a cell phone, limited-use computer and general personal planner…. well, that person would probably have received a similar response to what Doc Searls got at iCitizen today: sounds intriguing, but what, what?

Doc talked about “vendor relationship manangement.” It’s what’s needed when the “attention economy” makes a decision to act or buy and – thus – becomes the “intention economy.” And, has something to do with using your data & personal and logical preferences to define rather than accommodate how you’ll buy / share your information / relate to the companies you do business with. Everything from owning your own healthcare data to setting your own privacy expectations to pre-defining how much you’ll pay for the exact thing that you really want.

I mentioned the response to a theoretical iPhone 5 years ago because what hangs in the balance for Doc’s theory is what “thing” will make his idea concrete and easy vs. wildly theoretical and seeming like a massive-new-responsibility-and-time-investment-this-convenience-girl- wants-nothing-in-the-world-to-do-with.

Check out Andrea’s coverage for more background.

Twittering:

  • Doc calls Web “the Net.” Love the anachronisms when digital adopters talk ‘what’s coming’
  • Doc talks about approach – “we list all the things we think are true that no one’s talking about” So us.
  • Key driver of open source, not just anyone can create and use, but anyone can IMPROVE IT.
  • Attention economy has evolved to intention economy on the live Web … what you get when a customers mind is made up.
  • Attention economy until point of decision then intention economy. Using car rental as example of industry without intention.
  • What could car rental do if it knew customer intention. If it stopped “trap and hold” tactics like “car you want or similar”
  • Want to express logical and personal preferences, like no ads when calling tech support or will pay for faster service
  • Doc’s point seems to be: smartest people about the right experience are your customers, not your employees or competitiros.
  • Doc pokes at a big box retailer for saying they want to “own the customer.” Another term for owning humans? Slavery. Why do we talk that way? Because we’re too busy talking to ourselves and not our customers.
  • Doc must be part of RenGen. So far referenced Rousseau, Whitman, Marx … waiting for the test at this point
  • Doc unfinished biz of Cluetrain is Vendor Relationship Mgt – control by customers who are in free markets & engaging with vendors
  • VRM is not necessarily social because social makes assumption we have power in numbers. We have power as individuals, not from vendors who want to leverage our mass.
  • In identity world, cards /prices/ rels not issued to you. You issue your own card / intention / “RFP” http://snurl.com/29×75
  • Doc’s VRM sounds way hard. I don’t want to manage my relationship with Target or write a RFP for a blender. I don’t have an acquisition dept.
  • In simplest form, Doc’s ideas seem like convenience of Canada’s Airmiles. www.airmiles.ca – all data in one place for one purpose / reward
  • Bigger than that Doc’s approach seems so high engagement and limited in audience … but says something will come along to make it simple
  • Kind of scares me that I can’t get on board with this. Newest ideas coming from oldest guy in room. 30-somethings snarking.

Echovar on Small Bits of the Distributed Future in Cleveland:

At a Cleveland American Advertising Federation luncheon today, Larry Weber talked to a room full of traditional PR and marketing types about “marketing” and social networks. While the talk was mostly a new coat of paint on the Cluetrain Manifesto, it was interesting that this group of people showed up in good numbers to listen. As the talk went on I could feel that the room, even at this late date, was skeptical of his premise that markets are conversations with communities.

Weber suggests that big brands should be hosting honest conversations containing both positive and negative messages about their products. He recommended building communities from scratch around a brand, and implied that the brand should want to keep the users inside their own walled garden. In fact, he suggested that the network’s future will be filled with social network-based walled gardens existing as a form of client loyalty program. No mentions of VRM or the role OpenID will play in the future of the commecial web. And not even a hint of the way that Google’s Friend Connect might bring existing social networks to a brand’s site, rather than building a new community from the ground up.

Digidave on a video interview I did last year with Amanda Congdon:

“Advertising as we know it today is terminal. Part of this vendor relationship management thing that I want to do is blow-up advertising as we know it. I want to change the game to one where the intentions of the customer are what drive the marketplace rather than effort to get the attention of the customer has been doing for the last 100 years or so.”

Doc is crazy smart. His idea for VRM is WAY out there. Almost too far out. I like to think that Spot.Us is a small step towards what he envisions in his head.

Craig Overend vs. Online Identity: ” Until decentralized data persistence, redundancy, namespace, and relationship management tools are here, it’s all bunk.” He says much more. Read the comments too.

Sean Coon on Marketing, Bill Hicks And A System That’s Bound To Implode:

“Doc Searls is a demand-side advocate, and I completely agree with his position on the false construct of our system that attempts to connect markets to product via the boisterous shouting of offers into the wind. Maybe his VRM work will begin to flip the script on that paradigm, maybe not.”

Mads Kristensen on Trying to get to grips with VRM:

 I’m desperately trying to get my grips around the concept of VRM or Vendor Relationship Management. I think its very important for the way society is heading with the Customer becoming King.

The concept as such is simple enough. Where CRM – Customer Relationship Management – is about staying updated and on track with you customers and clients, VRM is the opposite. It’s about you staying on top of the companies that you have some sort of relationship with.

From here it gets pretty technical. A lot of ideas are floating around, but thankfully there are good people, who try to help one sorting everything out. So I’m still an optimist as to one day finally getting it.

Bart on My Request to Give:

“Would it not be an idea to develop some sort of RelButton and build some sort of VRM standard based on a “Request To Give” (RTG)?”

It could look something like this:

“… I have 2 laptops and 100 USD which I would like to give to a school in Africa …”
Now this is communicated to the smaller NGO’s which now will have “to compete” for these goods.

By doing so, they (the NGO) start to create a new (and hopefully) a more sustainable relationship with the donor.

What do you think, would this idea fly, or is the NGO community to closed, or not ready yet?
And do you know some NGO’s I could contact to discuss the nuts and bolts of such a platform?

Let me know. I want to see such a platform work.

My own bottom line here is that our enthusiasm and our advocacy is outrunning our clarity and our code. We need a lot more of both. I’m more responsible than anybody else for the former, so I have my work cut out there.

Clearly the relbutton helps, a lot. This last week was the first time I’ve surfaced it in public, and it goes a long way toward clarifying what VRM is, and how it will work. But the words of a VC still ring in my ears here: we need some first-rate UI work done here.

VRM has to be simple and non-geeky. It needs to be less work for customers, not more. Same goes for vendors. The trade-off has to be clear and so choice-free that You Just Have To Do This.

We’re not there yet. And we need to move there, quickly.

On Adriana and Alec’s distinction between “feeds-based VRM” and “identity-based VRM”, I see her points and appreciate the distinction.

— Doc

See change

May 13, 2008 / / 1 Comment

James Kalbach has an interesting review of Subject to Change, the new book by Peter Merholz, Brandon Schauer, Todd Wilkens and David Verba, which all work at Adaptive Path.

It opens with a reference to Cluetrain, then explains how the Subject to Change’s authors advise companies to focus on empathy with the user, “deep customer understanding” and stuff like that. Looks good.

I like the closing pull-quote, which points in a VRM direction:

As markets, people’s lives, and the world are becoming more complex, many of the old, easy answers to business problems are insufficient. Developing creative, agile, and experience-focused approaches will be a key business practice for small and large companies alike.

The problem is, you can perfect all approaches and practices on the sell side; but if all the responsibility for the relationship with the customer is on the seller’s side, we still have a one-sided system. The customer needs to be equipped too. That’s what VRM is about.

Mine!

May 12, 2008 / / 0 Comments

In ProjectVRM we’ve been talking for some time about equipping users with tools for both independence and engagement. In a detailed paper titled Mine! as VRM Infrastructure,  Adriana Lukas has given a name to at least one toolbox: Mine!

I like it.

It begins,

This paper sets out to describe a version of infrastructure or foundation for VRM (Vendor Relationship Management) based on an alternative view on sharing information online between individuals and of online identity. It sets out to explain the strategy and tactics for design, development and adoption of tools – the Mine! and FeedMe (see glossary) – and creation of an infrastructure for other solutions – VRM (relationships with individuals and vendors, transactions), self-defined identity, authentication, data portability and hopefully many more. The aim is to equip individuals with tools to take charge of their data (content, relationships, transactions, knowledge), arrange (analyse, manipulate, combine, mash-up) them according to their needs and preferences and share them on their own terms whilst connected and networked on the web.

With regard to technical aspects, the goals of this paper are, again, to:

  1. invent as little as possible
  2. reuse only popular technologies, techniques and user-interface metaphors in order to enable VRM, and…
  3. provide maximal inclusiveness and extensibility to the Mine! implementation, to permit the greatest potential for growth.

This is very consistent with what Andre Durand started saying back around the turn of the millennium, and what I said in my closing keynote at Digital ID World (DIDW) in 2003.

We are finally there.

VRM is user-driven

April 28, 2008 / / 21 Comments

In Two tales of user-centricities, Adriana Lukas gets at something that has bothered me for years about the term “user-centric”. It always seemed too external to me. It equates too easily with terms like “customer-focused”. It’s something an organization does for a user. Not something a user does for herself or himself.

In the past I’ve tried to steer the identity development community away from it, suggesting terms like “independent” instead of “user-centric”. But I failed and just accepted “user-centric” as is. Hell, I don’t like the term “user”, either.

But I think Adriana is right about “-driven”. It’s a much better term. I don’t know if it’s too late to get the identity community to adopt it, but we’re still getting started with VRM. Regardless of what adjectival phrases we use to describe what VRM is about, it’s essential to get our vectors right.

With VRM, our vectors are anchored on the user side, the customer side, the individual’s side. The relationships we establish and manage are on our terms and not just those of vendors. We are not against vendors in the least, of course. Our logic is AND, not OR. But it starts with the sovereign autonomy and independence of each individual as a fully-empowered participant in the relationships that comprise markets and other social arrangements. “-driven” says that much more clearly and correctly than “-centric”.

Same goes for the identity development efforts I’m most familiar with. The difference is that they’re downstream with their vocabularies and we’re not.

For the identity folks, I’d like to see a session at IIW (and discussion in any case) about concepts and vocabularies. Because when I look at this goal of Identity Commons …

To support, facilitate, and promote the creation of an open identity layer for the Internet, one that maximizes control, convenience, and privacy for the individual while encouraging the development of healthy, interoperable communities.

… I see “-driven” rather than “-centric”.

So hey, maybe it’s not too late. The Identity Thing is still pretty young, too.

Another problematic noun in the identity lexicon is “provider”. Here OpenID talks about “identity providers” both as servers the user operates and as something you get from other entities. Specifically,

OpenID allows anyone who can run a web server to run an identity server. Your identity server is separate from your identity, so you are free to use any identity server that has some ability to validate your identity and you can change between them at will. An identity server is sometimes referred to as an identity provider. If you wish, you can use the services listed below with your own website as your identifier using delegation…

The following sites provide OpenID identities and servers to verify them.

People want to feel, to know, that they are in charge of their own identities, and how those identities are used. “Providing” identities from the outside seems quite different, even if we’re actually talking about infrastructure that supports individuals providing for themselves — which OpenID does.

So, food for re-thought.

And, while we’re at it, maybe we should lose the term “user” as well.

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