What about open do they not understand?
Alex Barnett does:
Claria's proposition is that it'll track you everywhere - 'myware' but without the 'my'. Can you edit the data it tracks? Can you export it? Can you expose it to another service and treat the data it collects as your data? Is it your data? Nope, nope, nope, nope and er, nope. Sounds great doesn't it?! Install software that tracks your everyclick so marketers can spam you! Lovely! Sign me up!! Not.
This is where the Attention recorders come in (as Jon Galloway pointed out in the comments to my related post). This is where Steve is coming from. There are others thinking this way too. The questions I have are:
- which of the Attention recorders will play an open Attention data game?
- by open I mean - which attention recorders will allow the users' data to be edited, viewed, shared, purged, exported and controlled - fully - by the user?
- and which of these recorders will act as a service that others services (or people) can connect to (or locked out) with the user's permission?
- and...which developers of the newstrackers, aggregators, attention engines and raft of other services that would benefit in accessing that data with the user's permission will be smart enough to see the opportunity here by allowing the third party, *trusted* recorder-provisioned, user-controlled attention data pools to plug in?
I've still not got the GestureBank invite. But from everything Steve has written about his idea it looks like its going to set the standard in the open myware / mydata / attention data / recorder / connector scene.
Alex -- you are in the beta program. Once the last 3 2 testers in the initial beta are is confirmed (email gesturebank AT gmail.com from a gmail account) the pool will open its doors to the testers. Once we've got the software up and running, the fruits of the open pool of metadata will be shared, first with the initial group, and then, when we can handle it, anyone who wants to join. The price of admission: Contributing to the open pool of anonymized metadata. Alex gets it. Come on in, the water's fine.