Sugarstats is one of those rare applications online that provide individual users with analytical functionality. This means that you will get more out of it than what you put in it, in terms of data alone, even before experiencing the social benefit of sharing it. I consider applications like this essential to VRM and by reviewing sugarstats I want to draw attention to analytical aspects of data management that are sorely missing from all our data whizzing around the web. The individual user is usually the last person to benefit from his or her own data, if they benefit at all.

Here is what some of the data input looks like:

screenshot of data entries

From their About us section:

SugarStats is a web-based blood sugar tracker and diabetes management system built by diabetics for diabetics.

With SugarStats you can track your blood sugar glucose levels along with the elements that effect those levels such as medication, food intake and physical activity. You can then easily share this information with your health care professional, family and friends [...]

It is the Why (We do what we do) section that cought my attention:

In its initial concept, SugarStats came out of a personal project to provide a centrally available, online and easy to use glucose tracking and diabetes management system. Online diabetes management is not a new concept, but we didn’t see satisfying solutions that really were welcoming to the end user—the diabetic using it everyday. We wanted to create something that was not only easy to use and effective, but something that people would WANT to use and that didn’t look like it was built for a medical professional to use.

This seems to be the best motivation for building a tool like this and in case of sugarstats, it proved to be the right one too.

The sugarstats platform is closed, meaning you input your data and in exchange you get the ability to track, manage and analyse them.  Your data is exportable in an open format
 (CSV), and opens as a spreadsheet or it can be imported into any other application that accepts the format.  This means that your data is reasonably open on the spectrum of exportability
 and structured enough for reuse in another application.

screenshot of export

The data export is in definable sections, daily readings, weekly stats or a monthly graph and variations thereof.

screenshot of data export

screenshot of data segment export

I couldn’t find anywhere on the site export for the entirety of my data, which could be an issue - after using sugarstats for a few years, exporting all of it month by month might be a bit tedious. I test-deleted one of the accounts I created and there was no option to export even at that stage. However, the bottom line is that if you want to take your data out of sugarstats, there is a way, even if it’s time consuming when you have accummulated a lot of data.

I haven’t seen any way of importing data which could be convenient if you are someone who has kept your diabetes stats in a spreadsheet, for example. You might be looking at manual input or just starting from scratch. A useful functionality on the input side is the ability to input sugar and meds entries via email by sending them to a unique email address.

screenshot of unique email address

There are no feeds of your data/stats. The only feeds I was able to find were from the Sugarstats blog and from the home page. To my surprise they were two different feeds.

Data ownership amounts to ability to export and delete it, both of which is possible as mentioned above.

As for privacy, there are several levels users can choose right at the sign-up:

screenshot of privacy setting at sign-up

More details on what those levels represent:

screenshot of privacy settings details

From the privacy policy:

If you have your account set to private, we will not disclose to third parties any identifying data, including your name, mailing address, e-mail address or phone number without your express permission. To ensure the privacy of your data, never share your username and password with anyone unless you want them to have access to your data.

Their privacy policy has a bit about data sharing
 with third parties and authentication / authorisation
:

Affiliated sites - We offer some of  our services in connection with other web sites. Personal information that you provide to those sites may be sent to SugarStats in order to deliver the  service. We process such information in accordance with this Policy. The affiliated sites may have different privacy practices and we encourage you to read their privacy policies.

They also emphasise secure SSL encryption as part of their treatment of user data.

In terms of data crunching and data reduction sugarstats is one of the strongest applications on the web. There are the blood sugar statistics, of course:

screenshot of stats entry

screenshot of medical entry

Apart from the stats and med data entry, there is also tagging:

screenshot of tag management

The graphs let you visualize your statistics in a simple and easy to read manner. For a given time frame you’ll also be presented with trends calculated from those statistics for your glucose, medications, food intake and physical activity.

screenshot of graph

The graphs can be daily, weekly and monthly, providing useful display and visualisation of data, progress of the condition and its management.

There are also three diabetic logs:

These are more records than input for further analysis but they provide an important context to the daily management of stats. There is also a journal, which is looks like a private blog for more free style notes than all the other entries.

There is major value added to your data by the application
, simply by enabling you to collect and collate data related to various aspects of diabetes. The analysis and contextual information or records add further dimension to the user’s understanding of the condition.

Sugarstats is first and foremost an online tool for individuals with diabetes to manage. The relationship with the platform is that of a provider of functionality and storage for data. Sharing is encouraged both within the service and beyond.

screenshot of sharing

As for accountability & human contact the Contact us section has two generic emails: info@sugarstats.com and support@sugarstats.com for press inquiries and for user support. Not very accessible, however, there is also a community around sugarstats across several social networks:

• TuDiabetes SugarStats Group
• Facebook SugarStats Group
• SugarStats Forum
• DiabetesFriends.net

Also, the blog’s main contributor is Bob and presumably he can be reached through a comment on a blog post. There are also names and bios of the founders in the About us section.

Sugarstats deals with specific data types i.e. health related data, such as sugar levels and medication records, as well as carb/food intake and exercise tracking.

The business impact is providing a better tool than many of the available applications, namely manufacturers of medical devices for monitoring blood sugar levels etc. It is also an example of not only a patient-driven application but also one that originated from patients. As previously quoted from their blurb: … diabetes management system built by diabetics for diabetics.

In that sense, it does change the supply chain
 for such applications and services, as it is a clear example of the demand side supplying itself (link to MI) that the web so disruptively and wonderfully enables.

The payment model is pretty straightfoward - there are two plans, one free and premium - aka freemium. The plans are compared here.

screenshot of price plans

They also have a shop with medical devices relevant to diabetes and related conditions.

screenshot of the store

Sugarstats does seem like a very useful application for people with diabetes (and for whose who care for or about them), where the users drives the value by capturing their data and having a way of analysing them. It improves the users understanding of his condition and helps him manage it better. I only wish we had more applications like that available for other areas of our lives, online or otherwise.

One of the earliest scenarios for VRM has been travel. For me travel starts with the ability to capture data during planning my travel and to store them for future reference, whether making a similar trip or assisting somebody else on theirs.

TripIt is an online service that helps people organize all their travel plans—flights, hotels, rental cars, trains, cruises—no matter where they booked. To get started, travelers just forward their travel confirmation emails to plans@tripit.com. TripIt processes these emails and automatically creates a master itinerary with travel plans, daily weather, local maps, restaurant reservations, city guides and more. With TripIt, travelers can print, access and share their travel plans online, from a mobile device or even in their personal calendar.

The site aggregates your various booking and travel confirmation emails into Travel Plans based on dates.

At the heart of TripIt is the Itinerator, which is TripIt’s patent-pending and proprietary technology for automatically creating itineraries from travel confirmation emails. The Itinerator is an open technology platform that works with all major travel websites and all major email systems. A person simply forwards TripIt their original travel confirmation emails and then TripIt extracts the data to create a combined master online itinerary.

There is also a number of tools such as TripClipper that allows you to clip bits of text from websites are you surf. Very useful when searching for a hotel, let’s say, and putting all the reviews together to make the final decision.

TripIt to Me is another feature that lets you get your trip information from anywhere you have access to email, including mobile devices. Just send a command to plans@tripit.com and we’ll email you the information right away. For example, if you email “get trip” to plans@tripit.com, TripIt will email back your current trip itinerary for today.

I have been in situations where I either forgot to print my itinerary or the print-out is sitting on my printer forgotten. A useful back up.

TripIt takes user data and stores them on their own platform. Data is inputed either manually or by emailing it to plans@tripit.com. I couldn’t find any way of exporting the data, which usually can be found in section about closing an account. You can merge account, you can delete it but nowhere is a way of exporting your accumulated travel history/data.

screenshot of delete account

Although there is no export, there is two other features that allow you to get your data out one way or another:

One is the site’s use of microformats - HTML code added to pages that enables certain data, such as contact information, locations and events to be extracted by a microformat reader. This needs to be installed as a browser add-on.

The other is the API for developers - TripIt wants to be an open platform for integration and organization of travel information from many different sources. The TripIt API allows third parties to easily interface with this platform and:

• Seamless email import technology for your customers to add travel plans to your application
• Insight into a traveler’s entire trip (air, hotel, car, restaurants, meetings, etc.)
• Outputting travel data to social network applications

Not exactly direct data ownership for the user but there doesn’t seem anything stopping development of an exporter/importer for my TripIt data. So this is another step forward, even if sideways, for freedom of my data.

The data type is specific, i.e. relating to travel. As for data crunching, the data is organised in itineraries and travel plans, with forms to be filled in or data automatically structured by the Itinerator. In order to provide consistent information, i.e. itineraries, a fair amount of structure is imposed on the user when filling in the details manually. I found that my travel data exists in more than just email or free text, e.g. PDFs and converting everything into either graphic to be attached to an itinerary or manually inputing it, seems rather laborious for my taste.

There is not much ability to add value to your data other than its aggregation on the site in a particular format and structure. This falls more under visualisation or display of data rather than data reduction, i.e. analysis or inferences based on your data.

There is value, of course, in making that data accessible in different ways (feeds, email, mobile etc) and available in different formats (HTML/microformats, iCal, Atom, etc)

tripIt travel data consists of partly your input and data generated by your travel providers (confirmation email).

There are a number of ways to share you travel plans, both private and public:

1. Private sharing invitations – In most cases, this is the best method for sharing your trips. You send an invitation to someone by email, granting them access to view your trip. Only you and people you specifically invite have access to your travel plans. You can even set permission levels so that invitees may only view your trip, or you can let them modify the trip by making them collaborators.
2. Public sharing by URL – You can generate a special link/URL that will let anyone view your trip. This method is helpful if you want to post your trip on your blog or in some other forum, where any member of the public could view your itinerary. Because trips often contain sensitive personal data, use public URL sharing cautiously.

screenshot of public sharing by URL

Another way of getting information out of TripIt is feeds:

TripIt account has certain feeds meant for your personal use and certain feeds meant for you to make available to others. Your Alerts and Personal Calendar feeds are only available to you and should remain private. Your Location Stream and Activity Feed can be made available to Your TripIt Network or Everyone.

Here I subscribe to Simon Phipps activity feed:

screenshot of activity feed subscription

Activity feed contains information about things you’ve done in TripIt, and is mainly used to keep others up to date on your travel plans. This feed will post stories when:

• You have made new Connections
• You are planning a new trip, just returning from a trip or about to leave on a trip

A bit of a howler in the FAQ:

Uh oh.

As for community there are TripIt Connections in your Network.

A Connection in TripIt is someone with whom you want to share information about yourself and your travels, on a continual basis. Your Connections will automatically be able to see a list of the destinations associated with your TripIt itineraries, and you can see the same for your Connections.

The TripIt privacy policy states their attitude to data
 with regard to 3rd parties
:

With business firms contracted to provide specific services to us, in a manner consistent with this Privacy Policy. In situations such as this where your data is shared with a third-party firm, the firm will be contractually obligated to use your personal data only for the purpose for which our relationship with the firm exists. The firm will not have the right to share your data with other organizations or contact you outside the bounds of their contract with us.

User have a chance to authorise or deny any sharing of personal information with 3rd parties:

Other than as set out above, you will be notified when personal information about you will be shared with third parties, and you will have an opportunity to choose not to have us share such information.

From the section on Third Party Advertising:

From time to time, we may use a third-party advertising company to serve advertising on our behalf. Through the use of technology devices commonly referred to as cookies and action tags, this third-party ad-serving company can measure the effectiveness of our ads.

And further:

Our third-party ad server may also receive specific information about your use of the Service. Rest assured that this shared information is anonymous and does not contain any sensitive information.

There is a standard contact us page and I haven’t been able to find any names of people for that purpose. There are bios of the team together with their itinerary, in case you really need to track them down.

The business impact
 is most likely displacement of any enterprise or desktop software designed for travel management in large corporations. TripIt is explicitly aimed at business traveller:

Based on the following, I was going to assume that TripIt could be installed on a company’s servers for customised and internal use, making travel arrangements and connections web and user friendly:

TripIt already has business users at all 100 of the BTN 100 top-traveling companies and 76 of Fortune 100 companies, including leading companies like Apple, Cisco, Deloitte, Expedia, Google, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Sun, and Yahoo. To get your company supported, just forward your business travel confirmation emails to TripIt.

However, this is what the founder said about revenue model in an interview last year:

TripIt, to be clear, is not a travel booking site and we don’t want to be in the travel booking business. That’s super competitive and there are lots of places that do that quite well. We want to be in the information management and sharing business, so our revenue model is a combination of lead generation to people who do book travel or components of travel plus hyper targeted advertising. So that’s how we expect to make money.

The payment model
 free to users. Judging from the mention of third-party advertising in the privacy policy, the revenue is meant to come from advertisers though I haven’t seen any adverts so far.

As with most social web services, there is little relationship with the platform and more with connections made through it.

For many VRM is associated with identity. I also often talk about how my ‘identity’ is scattered across the web in dozens of platforms and services. There are at least two types of applications trying to address that: Online business card services applications such as idLasso, retaggr, MeedID etc. and activity streams such as FriendFeed, PlaxoPulse, Twitter, Facebook news feed etc.

In this review I will look at the three above mentioned ‘online business card services’ together, as they have many commonalities and are all meta-identity* (note about what is meta-identity) related - idLasso, MeedID and retaggr. What is their purpose? Do they help me join up my online presence?

The three services offer varying level of functionality, from linking (MeeID) to pulling together (idLasso), to consolidating (retaggr) the various social web apps I use.

idLasso gives you something to take away and embed it in your own blog or site. MeeID is provides a link to lists of places you ‘frequent’ on the web, no less, no more. retaggr, on the other hand, brings you to their platform (although it gives you plenty of ways of distributing your profile cards across yours and others’ sites and blogs).

IdLasso

Technically speaking, I’d say that idLasso is a widget not a card - in the sense of MS cardspace a card is a representation of a item of data that can be transferred or used as part of a transaction. In the sense of a business card, it could pass as one - it allows you to ‘leave’ your contact and online information in a place. idLasso is also skirting the edges of social ‘graphing’ - by putting together my social web services in one place and allowing me to compare that list with those of my contacts and friends. As Mike Butcher puts it:

And if you add your friends on idlasso it’s possible to see which networks you are connected on and those that you’re not (but could be). This makes it easier to fill in gaps in your social graph.

IdLasso is open to ‘importing’ data from other web services - Flickr, Twitter and theoretically many others, more accurately inputing data. I didn’t have much luck adding them though.

There is a nifty option of using a regular username that you have used across many web services and see what services turn up. You can then add those at a click of a button, which will take you to the service in question and ask you to authorise idLasso. When authorising it to add my YouTube account, I can only hope it was using OAuth to do so.

screenshot of youtube authorisation

Adding YouTube worked but Digg and many others haven’t. There seem to be three categories of web services status - verified, unverified, and unverifiable. This is what their FAQ says about that:

Q: I don’t understand the verification of accounts, can you explain it?

A: When we add accounts we try to verify that they can only be yours (a verified account). If an error occurs during verification or you decide not to allow idlasso to connect to your data on the 3rd party site then the account is added as unverified (ie it can be verified but hasn’t been so far). Verification is not possible on all services so we add these accounts as unverifiable. We are working to make all accounts verifiable.

Q: I can’t verify account x, any idea why?

A: For some services we rely on an API to authorise your account. If the 3rd party website is experiencing problems then we may not be able to verify your account at that time. Simply try again later.

For example, I tried to add my Dopplr account and other of my commonly used webservices, but I cannot work out why some of them show up on my card and some don’t. Even after finding this list of idLasso-friendly web services I couldn’t work it out.

Adding Facebook to my idLasso services, I encountered the same problem as with adding my chi.mp updates to Facebook [link]. I am using Firefox with cookies enabled, though third-party cookies are not enabled. I don’t believe they are needed. And yet, I keep getting a message that I need to enable cookies in my browser. See below:

screenshort of facebook authorisation

Importing contacts from Twitter only threw up two contacts both of whom I couldn’t recognise, so didn’t add to my idLasso ‘friends’.

As for export of data, there is none. It may not be a big deal as the only function of idLasso is to generate ‘cards’ to with your various web services accounts to put on your blog or site. Still it would be nice to have a way extracting a piece of XML with a documented structure that describes what my different login names are. So the data is as locked up as it would be on Facebook. You can have a idLasso card on your blog but it doesn’t mean you can get at your data.

In term of data crunching, it would be nice to get some value out of putting all that information there, and idLasso enables me to create more than one card. I assumed that that means I can selectively remove or include web services for each card. That doesn’t appear to be the case. So I must ask, what’s the point? It appears to be all about visualisation, the look and feel of the ‘cards’ and ability to generate blobs of code to publish and share the ‘cards’ on the web, which seems to be the only value added to the data.

The data types are mostly your identity data, or what I would call meta-identity*.

The attitude to data ownership is demonstrated by lack of access to your data in open and exportable format. There is a delete button in a visible place on the profile page.

The privacy statement contains the following section on data sharing.

idlasso.com does not rent, sell, or share personal information about you with other people or non-affiliated companies except to provide products or services you’ve requested, when we have your permission, or under the following circumstances:

* We provide the information to trusted partners who work on behalf of or with idlasso.com under confidentiality agreements. These companies may use your personal information to help idlasso.com communicate with you about offers from idlasso.com and our marketing partners. However, these companies do not have any independent right to share this information.

My reading of this is that idLasso can give access to your information to anyone they want, er, their ‘trusted partners’ who then ‘help’ them communicate their offers to you. The kindest interpretation of this is that they may want to engage a PR or marketing agency to help them talk to you. What worries is their ‘marketing partners’, a term which could cover a multitude of sins and many opportunities for spam.

Contact is via an email feedback@idlasso.com and the name of its creator and his idLasso card are on the About page.

The payment model is free, business impact remains to be seen. As for relationship, idLasso is a service around my relationships with others, there is no relationship with idLasso as such other then displaying link to it on your ‘cards’.

MeeID

idLasso and MeeID seems to be historically and closely related. The technology behind the ‘cards’ used to be called meecard and was adopted for idLasso.

MeeID is attractively simple. A landing page with graphical explanation of what I am about to build for yourself. Another page with 10 empty fields where links to my various blogs and profile pages go. Open or closed service, blog or dopplr, the links are useful - if they are public, you’ll see them straightaway, my blogs, flickr, del.icio.us or twitter page. If they are closed, you know where I am and find me on dopplr, facebook, linkedIn etc.

screenshot to my MeeID

My only gripe is: why only 10 lines? I have at least 5 blogs that I might want to link to plus many web services that I am using. Surely it’s not enough… can I add more fields to the ‘card’?

MeeID doesn’t pretend to be than an aggregator of your online existence or data streams. At best it’s an index of them. It don’t import nothing, it don’t need to export nothing… Though being able to download a blob of XML with an index of links would be nice for my further use.

It doesn’t need authentication or authorisation, it is entirely user-driven, though minimalist, meaning I add what I add, no more. Alright, you can’t embed any pretty badges or widgets anywhere but you can link to it. It bypasses the usual confusion of meta-identity with identity - it clearly deals with what is meta-identity, i.e. shortcuts or links to my real identity which is the stuff I generate, publish and distribute.

So I stand corrected, it’s beautifully simple. And it does what it says on the tin.

screenshot of home page

Retaggr

What is retaggr about:

Unifying your online profiles. Bring all your profiles on all your services into one place, so the world can find out who you are, and connect with you.

We’re not another social network. You already have your profiles all over the web. We help consolidate your identity.

We give you a bunch of tools to do so. Retaggr widgets, badges, an email signature, the Add-Me-Button, and of course, your rich, interactive Profile Card.

Profile section is where I started. The usual info gathering - I am becoming slightly allergic to those fields that ask you to ‘Write a few lines about yourself’ - I’d rather link to something of mine that shows you who I am. It has a status field, which can be populated via Twitter or other ‘microblogging services’.

The profile section has 11 tabs. Websites You Use seems to be the crucial one for adding web services I use. Various web apps are divided into the following sections:

screenshot of retaggr web services

The list is very comprehensive and adding web services is straightforward, provided you remember all your usernames. I like the way you know immediately if you entered a wrong username and there is a helpful link next to each field to identify the correct format of your username. If something is missing you can let retaggr know.

Add a link to any profile you have elsewhere on the net. We’ll try grab an icon for it, add it to your card, and do what we can to get a widget.

In the next tab, you can add your blogs - name, URL and feed URL. Annoyingly, if you leave the feed URL field empty, it doesn’t allow you to edit the entry after you publish it, so I had to delete it and then do another one with all the info complete.

The next tab is widgets that you can add to retaggr. I decided to try for a TripIt badge and although I managed in the end it wasn’t straightforward. I first needed to get some code from TripIt and until I turned on the ‘blog tripit badge’ within TripIt itself, it really wasn’t obvious where I am supposed to get the code from. But that’s UI on TripIt side not retaggr’s. For comparison I also tried a Dopplr badge, and again I had to enable it on Dopplr site but the explanation was clearer. There were also more options to control who sees what (note: I particularly liked the option that allows only those logged onto Dopplr and in my network tosee my trips in my blog’s Dopplr badge).

screenshot of Dopplr badge

But that’s for another review. Finally, I tried a Facebook badge, which was easiest both in terms of implementation as well as in terms of setting up what is displayed on it.

screenshot of Facebook badge

The next tab was Professional, which was about my work details. I added The Mine! Project and when it came to industry allocation, I was faced with those drop down menus I so hate. Why would an online web savvy service just copy one of those dry, incomplete and inaccurate list of industries from about the turn of the last century with a bunch of technology sectors bolted-on is beyond me. Yes, yes, I know about taxonomies and abillity to categorise people according to industry will allow someone search or use that data further… But users rule and I want to be able to describe what I do with tags or in my own words. The Mine! project is an open source project and I wasn’t going to allocate it ‘Computer Software’ industry. I chose Internet - ponderous but closer.

The next tab was Affiliation, i.e. professional entities you are associated. I added VRM Hub, uploaded the graphic we use on the site and wiki, URL and done.

The next tab was More details that presented a pull down menu with a few more details you might add and they would be displayed in About me section.

The final tab was More with question about what’s missing and how they can help to include it. Nice.

An exhaustive and exhausting compilation of all your online and offline bits and pieces about you. One minor gripe, what retaggr calls a widget is called a badge by others. Just thought I’d mention it.

The next big section in the top menu was Profile Tools - these are ways for me to display, enable or distribute retaggr through embedding my profile on my site, customising a retaggr widget to display on my blog, getting a click-to-add-me-button to my profiles everywhere. I can even have a retaggr generated email signature.

screenshot of profile tools

Next we come to People. I couldn’t think of anyone other than Mike Butcher from the circle of my contacts who I was pretty sure would be registered with retaggr. And I was right.

screenshot of contact card

In the Other Services section, there is a cool functionality that allows you to ‘compare’ what you use with somebody else. I did that with Mike’s web services:

screenshot of comparing services

A bit of an unfair comparison as I was scraping the bottom of the barrel adding every service I could think of for the purposes of testing. There are some other services such as GreaseMonkey Scripts, recommendations of the most popular services and ability to email and ping your card.

As for data ownership, there is no way to get stuff out. Data crunching is mainly display and visualisation of my web services and other details in your Profile Card and Profile page.

There is no community or network within retaggr that I can see, nor sharing via feeds that I can see. Selective sharing doesn’t seem to be possible, though displaying information on the badges had some privacy or selective sharing options in Dopplr and Facebook, which is not retaggr’s merit. Retaggr is strong on web publishing in many and varied ways - profile card, embedded or in blog sidebar, badges, email signatures, retaggr enabled blogs and sites etc etc. I can delete the account:

You may completely remove your retaggr card from all retaggr enabled sites by terminating your account.

There is plenty of opportunities and invitations for feedback and contact - in fact, when twittered that I was working on this review I got a reply by a member of retaggr team offering help with any information I might need. Kudos for that.

Their privacy policy states:

Retaggr.com collects your email address as part of the retaggr service. We will never rent or sell your email address. We hate spam as much as you do.

Retrieving information from third party accounts:

If you choose to allow retaggr to interact with third party systems you will be requested to provide login information for this third party account. Your password will not be stored on the retaggr servers and will only be used for the request.

Any details retrieved will only be used to automate your use of retaggr and will never be shared, sold or rented.

Their explicit attitude to data is:

We take your privacy seriously and you are always in control to decide which of your details should be visible on your public retaggr card.

Retaggr is free, not sure how they use your data. I assume that the partnerships with other platforms to whom they add value are the budding business impact/model, which is not visible yet. It seems that, quite rightly, retaggr is focusing on such partnerships and on getting as many users as possible to retaggr-enable their blogs/site.

Recently we’ve been hard at work increasing the number of sites that automatically attach your retaggr card. [...] a partnership with comment mega-service coComment. This enables retaggr cards on the coComment site itself, and on the extensive network of sites and blogs using the service to power their discussions.

When you interact on a coComment enabled blog, or take part in conversations which are powered by their system, your retaggr card will be automatically attached to your contributions so people can easily see who you are and connect with you.

This is all part of our plan to grow the retaggr ecosystem. We’re working hard to bring retaggr to more sites in the near future.

To conlude, Retaggr, idLasso and MeeID are platforms that own my data i.e. the data I generate through my interactions with them. They offer functionality that is useful to someone who feels they need to offer an aggregated representation of their online presence across many web services. I am missing the ability to export or extract the blobs of JSON or XML which represent the list of other sites where I have accounts. Ultimately, Retaggr, idLasso and MeeId are siloed and not owned by the user - which is still the prevailing Web 2.0 model - and the information you share from Retaggr, IdLasso or MeedID is on an all-or-nothing basis.

The online business card services aggregate my meta-identities, mostly for the benefit of others. The goal I presume is that, not unlike Gravatar http://en.gravatar.com/, the benefit of Retaggr, idLasso or MeedID to the user is that he or she only has to amend that information once and it propagates to all the places that have access to the card.

Note*: I often see logins and passwords to various sites and platforms described as “identity”. I don’t think of them as my identity, but as things that I currently need to access bits of my scattered identity, at best they are my meta-identity. I see usernames/passwords/handles/GUID in general as meta-identity or shortcuts to my identity. Just like passport or driving license is not my identity, merely a proxy for it vis-a-vis a particular kind of system or record. More here and here

I signed up for chi.mp beta testing some time ago and set up my account a couple of months back. I remember seeing their placeholder web page almost a year ago and thinking this sounds good:

Chi.mp is building a flexible, permanent home for your online identity on your own domain. You own and are in control of the facets of your digital life, not any one service provider. One place for your profile, your contacts and content, where you have control over who gets to see what.

And they mean it with the own domain! You get your own page with .mp. There is more goodness in their description of what chi.mp can do for you:

Chi.mp not only gives you a free .mp domain name, but also provides state of the art tools to help you brand yourself and publish your existing web service content, into a single easy to find domain. Import contacts from your favorite services and merge them into a single master list that you can export at any time. Chi.mp gives you a complete platform to unify, brand, and manage your ever growing Web identity.

screenshot of other web services, opens up full size on the same page

The nice thing about chi.mp is that you get a private space where you can aggregate everything you create with other platforms, without having to share with someone by default. It also gives you an ‘intergrated’ contacts book - you can import your contacts from each of the web services you use and aggregate them on chi.mp. There is a menu tab called ‘manage multiple’ displays all your contacts and allows you to merge multiple contacts into one. This would be a useful functionality, given that I can also export my contacts out of chi.mp. I’d import contacts from all my ’social media accounts’, survey them, merge them, tidy them up, dust and polish them, then export them in vCard format. As for email contacts I can only import those that allow me to export them in the same format.

screenshot of contacts export, opens up full size on the same page

Merging the contacts under the ‘manage multiple’ can be very satisfying, in a kind of OCD way, until I decided to test it further. I could see my friend Alice Baccini-Smith as my Facebook-imported contact and I also know that her Twitter name was madhousewife. I valiantly, and laboriously, went through all the combined Facebook and Twitter contacts that seemed to be ordered more randomly than aphabetically. I thought, aha, if I find Alice close to ‘m’, then it’s too far from her real name and not very user friendly. Imagine my surprise when I couldn’t find her at all. Ditto for Mark Earls aka herdmeister, but then I found out that his updates are protected. This means that those contacts that have a special setting within individual services/platforms will not get imported even though those people are part of my contact book.

Adding various services was as easy or as painful as with other platforms trying to get you add other web services to your account there.

I have already added twitter as my first service when I first set up the account. Adding Flickr was painless,

screenshot of Flickr authentication, opens up full size on the same page

… but Facebook had a bit of a hicup for me. In order to push updates back to Facebook from chi.mp it required another confirmation that I indeed want to give access to my Facebook stuff from my chi.mp account. My browser decided that I need to have cookies enabled in order to login and approve, so I gave up.

screenshot of facebook authentication, opens up full size on the same page

Things got even more complicate with importing contacts from Facebook. When I first added Facebook I didn’t tick the box import contacts from Facebook. As I continued playing with chi.mp, I decided to import them after all to see how the merge functionality works. I wasn’t able to simply update the settings for Facebook, in order to import contacts I had to add Facebook again, which created a replica of Facebook activity stream in my chi.mp dashboard. I found a way to delete it later, so not a big deal, just a bit clunky.

screenshot of duplicate facebook, opens up full size on the same page

As for other web services on my list, I didn’t add gmail but that’s just my paranoia kicking in. I did add a feed from my personal blog, Media Influencer, which worked smoothly. I imagine you can add feeds from anywhere, but I assume the idea is feeds from your own content… given it’s about your identity.

To add and authenticate other web services, you go to the menu section “On the Web”. Despite adding Friendfeed and dopplr and delicious, I couldn’t find them on the list of available services to activate them and add their content to my dashboard.

I thought this may have to do with different usernames or their format. And indeed, for dopplr, my username is different, it is in fact an email. I tried to use both that email and my displayed name. Same for Friendfeed, which displays a nickname, but use another of my emails for login. I tried again. Didn’t work. Obviously, I am missing a beat here but if those three services were crucial to my chi.mp identity, I’d miss out on them.

The Chi.mp secret sauce of managing your identity seems to be based on your ability to create personas, as many as you wish:

Personas are your tool for determining “who sees what” about you on your site. Each Persona can have its own theme, profile information, profile photo/avatar, and content. You can create as many Personas as you like. You can also assign and invite contacts to each Persona. You are now in control of “who sees what”.

screenshot of new persona, opens up full size on the same page

The default personas are set for the usual ones - public, work, friends.

screenshot of default personas, opens up full size on the same page

For me most of my friends are also part of my ‘work’ life which is rather public, though I am a private person. My privacy ‘policy’ is not reflected in my access management, but rather in how I relate to different people and in my behaviour. Others, though, may like the option of creating different ways of showing themselves to the world.

The more fundamental issue here is that building personas is an approach rooted in traditional identity notions of ‘we are different people to different audiences, or in different contexts and environments’. Though this is apparently true, I think this has always been a fallacy - even before the web has blown up the foolproof option of different identities without cross-contamination. I may behave differently so people see different aspects of me but that doesn’t mean I am a different person, a different persona. By putting emphasis on the persona, I become slave to my audiences and contexts who ’shape’ how I display my personas.

I guess what I am really getting at is that personas are hard work. I’d find it a chore if I had to decide BEFORE going to a party who I am going to be and what information I will divulge or share in the course of the party with people I meet there. It’s what I’d call a ‘closed’ approach to identity, not unlike being a spy. You have different passports, different stories depending on who you deal with. For most of us, with a more routine existence, it is easier to go to the party and talk to people according to our implicit privacy ’settings’ or policy. For those who value their privacy too high, any effort at separating their aspects of life and personas is worth investing. Some people share their life story or talk about personal issues with strangers, others wouldn’t discuss the weather for fear of unwittingly revealing their preferences.

The web has shifted identity and its fundamentals. I can still be private but I can also shape my identity rather than be defined by others or by ‘markers’ that I had no choice over - date of birth, gender and nationality.

Back to the criteria for the app catwalk:

Web services these days have to provide storage as well as functionality for our data, and so are de facto silos. So openness of most apps here can only be judged on whether they also behave like silos or not. This means export, data portability and open formats.

Chi.mp ranks high on behaving openly, not only you can import your stuff relatively easily but you can export all of it , if you wish. And in open formats such as XML, JSON files and previously mentioned vCard.

Site Export. You can now export your .mp site which includes a zip file that contains a vCard for all your contacts, your photos, blog posts, portable contact records, statuses in XML and JSON files.

This, just like contacts, could be useful for aggregation of your ‘activity streams’ and then exporting them in ways you possibly couldn’t, as a user, from individual web services such as Facebook or Twitter. One to note for the future…

screenshot of export your chi.mp, opens up full size on the same page

Once you decide to export everything, you get an email with a link to the data, that expires after 72 hours.

screenshot of the email, opens up full size on the same page

Alas, the link didn’t work for me. I am sure it can be fixed easily, perhaps chi.mp didn’t expect people exporting stuff just yet

screenshot of the error in export link, opens up full size on the same page

I have emailed their support and got quickly set up with a ticket. This was on Wednesday and I haven’t heard back from them by the time this review was going up. Will post an update once anything happens.

On data crunching side i.e. ability to manage, manipulate, analyse etc data gathered or created with the web app, chi.mp is mainly an aggregator of data from other web services. The main functionality, apart from collating your activity streams, which good but not unique (see Friendfeed, Plaxo Pulse etc), is the ability to display it and filter it through pre-defined personas. This is a feature that some may appreciated and despite my misgivings about this approach to my online identity above I’ll mark it as a step forward in the user-driven design.

The only data structure that I can see is around the personas.

Data type is personal data. When it comes to personal data I differentiate between its two meanings. One kind of ‘personal data’ means one’s address, date of birth, phone number, social security number etc etc. And the other kind, proliferating with the advent of the social web, is the ‘data pertaining to a person’. Chi.mp, whether by default or by design, contains both - ‘personal data’ through the personas and ‘data pertaining to a person’ through activity stream that aggregates my social web services.

Does or can user add value to the data? Not directly or significantly. There may be some value in consolidating my contacts from email and social networks and then exporting them in open format. And perhaps in the future, there may be further use for the user of the XML and JSON files in exported content. Still, it’s more than what most web apps and services currently allow (with shining exception of Dopplr and Wesabe).

Data sharing is again filtered or displayed around personas that you create and manage for the benefits of people you interact with. There is the public page, in my case http://adriana.mp which has a feed, which I successfully added to my feed reader.

Their attitude to data is explicitely covered in the chi.mp Services Addendum (bottom of the main page)

The CHI.MP Service is a content hub and identity management platform that lets you own and control your content and your identity. As an Owner and participant in the CHI.MP Service, you are the owner of your original content and your identity, and you may transfer your Customer Content to another service provider at any time.  This CHI.MP Addendum describes your rights and obligations as an Owner of the CHI.MP Service.

…and their position on data ownership is supported by users’ ability to delete and/or export accounts with full content.

Section 1 of chi.mp’s Privacy Statement (center bottom of the main page) contains the following:

SAIPAN DATACOM DOES NOT GIVE, SELL, RENT, LOAN, OR OTHERWISE DISCLOSE ANY Personally Identifiable Information TO THIRD PARTIES EXCEPT WHEN WE HAVE YOUR EXPRESS PERMISSION OR UNDER CERTAIN CIRCUMSTANCES DESCRIBED IN THIS PRIVACY STATEMENT.

As for payment model, as long as you host your data on their platform, your chosen .mp domain remains free. You can purchase your domain for $20 a year, presumably if you want to host your data yourself under that domain.

screenshot of purchase your domain, opens up full size on the same page

There is a neat service chi.mp has around OpenID:

• your chi.mp domain is also your OpenID.
• OpenID Trusts are entries you generate by using your OpenID on other sites and asked to trust them with your identity information
• you can delete such entries from the list when you no longer trust those sites with your identity information

It’s too early to identify chi.mp business impact on any supply chains or disintermediation. Best of luck with any of those, always good to see some in progress on that front!

Oh, and chi.mp have definitely joined the trends of the Web 2.0-cute fail page.

screenshot of fail page, opens up full size on the same page

Related links:
chi.mp
chi.mp blog

I first heard about Ryanair Bargains from Fergus Burns of Nooked in 2007. When I did my session on VRM at IIW in December 2007 I mentioned it as an example of VRM-like functionality. I decided to write about it here as the first review for our VRM ‘app catwalk’.

The application can be found on the Ryanair website, in the bottom left-hand corner. It was created and is powered by Nooked and - as I understand it - was intended to shift the delivery from email to alerts specified by the customer.

The original version had two ways of receiving such alerts about Ryanair bargains. One option was to download a widget to your computer, the other option was to enter your preferences into data fields on the website. The first one would deliver alerts to your desktop, not dissimilar to the current app. The second one would generate feeds that you could then add to your feed reader. When there were new offers that fit your criteria, the feed would be updated. At the time I tested and it worked fine. The only quibble I had was that I had to enter amount I was willing to pay for a flight, which for me personally was a bit limiting especially without the ability to provide more context for my preferences but that may be just me. I am sure that for some this would be a desired featurer.

Here is a screenshot of a simple RSS feed from Ryanair in my old feedreader. As you can see, the feed doesn’t function anymore.

Now there is only one way to get such alerts and that is by downloading Ryanair Bargains to your deskop (explanation from the website):

1. Once you have downloaded Ryanair Bargains a Bargains pop up will appear on your desktop toolbar. This indicates that your download has been successful.
2. Once the Ryanair Bargains download appears on your toolbar, you are now ready to receive special offers. When Ryanair sends out a special offer a pop up will appear on your desktop providing you with details of the latest offer.

Here is a screenshot of the preferences. As you can see, there is only one option for ‘home airport’.

This is a screenshot of the pop-up that appears on your desktop after you select destinations.

Technical issue & information:

• the app appears to be for windows only

Usability issues:

• only one London airport can be select, which means that if the destinations you are interested in go from different London airports, bad luck
• application installs an icon to your desktop toolbar, which is intrusive and taking up valuable ‘desktop real estate’

Open or closed platform, data and format:

• data created only within the app and cannot be exported
• format is closed (even if RSS or Atom is used, I cannot use them in such format i.e. put them in my feed reader), previous version data was delivered in an open RSS format

Data:

• data type related to a specific topic, travel
• no data ownership by the customer
• data displayed and rendered through the desktop alert app
• not exportable
• user cannot add value to it

Sharing:

• none possible as bound to desktop
• original version with RSS feeds indirectly shareable, e.g. shared in google reader

Privacy:

• from user point of view - total or complete because closed and not shared
• from vendor point of view - depends on Ryanair privacy policy; we inquired whether the data could be used further e.g. Ryanair passing (anonymised) preferences collected via the app to third parties, data mining etc but haven’t yet received a response.

Third parties and service providers:

• Nooked, Ryanair

Business impact:

• a shift from email to alerts; from push to more pull style communication
• have inquired but not aware of Ryanair using the preferences to negotiate better rates with hotels and other suppliers, or analysing preferences to determining the sales structure

Payment model:

• free… though Ryanair logo is permanently visible on desktop toolbar

Relationship:

• minimal - specifiying preferences on the vendor’s terms and platform; the level of details and the nature of details is not determined by the customer
• offers are not specific to me, they are filtered alerts by my preferences; options for expressing those are currently very limited

Next week: chi.mp

We recorded the sessions and hope this captures them as fully as possible. Videos will be uploaded in due course. Many thanks to Alec for being the chief geek and setting it up.

It is hard for me to sum up the proceedings - being both closely involves in the substance and the format of the event. I deliberately kept things open and fluid as I was interested in what the speakers had to say - I have been thinking, writing and talking about VRM for the last two years and it’s nice to see others getting the drift. Also, as a frequent speaker myself I resent being bossed about by some panel chair and straightjacketed into Q&A sessions. The conversations that emerge from a freer structure tend to be of a higher quality. My goal for any public session is to get people think on their feet as well as present their prepared thoughts.

Over the last year or so, as many have been trying to move from concepts to practicalities, I have noticed one thing - VRM vision has a universal appeal. It makes sense on instinctive level and it has not been hard to get people interested in the project. Implementation, however, is another matter - there are as many approaches adopted to make VRM happen as there are people interested in VRM. Each of us project their mental models, experience and expertise on the vision and the nitty-gritty of making the ideas of VRM reality is many and varied.

Mine is, well, Mine!. Its design and implementation reflects my understanding of the web and the expertise I have gained over the years of living on it. It is built around the power of the individual and that of networks. It uses existing technology and is open source.

My experience tells me that the best way on the web to get something that works out there is to give people ability to manage their lives and relationships better and in generally help them do things they couldn’t do before. I also believe that the best way to drive adoption is not to ‘drive’ it. Make something useful, that works, fix bugs and improve things slowly but steadily.

Finally, I believe in the strength of community. My definition of community is a network with a purpose. And so I have been looking for people who are excited about VRM, see what I am seeing and want to join the effort. There are several ways to do that.

VRM Hub: monthly meetings for London VRM scene, good for individuals interested in VRM or already involved, for news, for (heated) discussions, varied speakers and VRM related topics. Social aspect not neglected, most evenings end up in a pub.

VRM Labs: sandbox for businesses and companies interested in exploring VRM and ready to experiment with it - from tools to business models and usage. Good for finding other people from large companies, meeting developers of VRM applications, banging heads together around what VRM means for business and thinking of potential pitfalls etc. etc.

The Mine! project: open source effort to build user-driven infrastructure for data and relationships logistics online. Starting point for other applications that help individuals better manage their data, relationships, their own privacy requirements and relate to vendors on their own terms. Good for developers and social web power users to test the hell out if when it’s ready to face the world and to come up with usage scenarios Mine! will enable.

I am already thinking about the next VRM Hub conference for end of January/start of February 2008. Date will depend on the venue I can get and will post details here, there and everywhere.

cross-posted from VRM Hub

The safest option was to stick to what I know and talk about online identity, with the aim of helping people see it from a different perspective and enabling them to apply that understanding in their own areas of expertise. VRM and the Mine! were mentioned in this context as practical approaches to patient-driven healthcare, which I see as one of the major implications of online developments in technology and behaviours related to health.

Here are the slides with detailed notes in the slide transcript, which is visible on the slideshare page.

There is a lot more to cover on this topic but 30 minutes was what I had. I hope to work on the VRM healthcare proposition within VRM Labs with companies experimenting with customer/user/patient-driven models and technologies.

cross-posted from Media Influencer

The event is called Unlocking the see-saw (link to the full programme with registration).

Ideas so far are that there will be two strands:  A Labs strand, to give some organisations who are already starting to apply VRM ideas a chance to talk about where they’re up to; and a Hubs strand, which will give users a chance to talk about what VRM means to them.

If this sounds like the kind of thing you’d be interested in attending, please let us know as it will be a really good chance for people to connect.

More details will be up here as and when we have them, so stay tuned.