[final article published on the O’Reilly Radar Blog – I put the unedited version up here]
I’m one of those people who, like most people, tends to surround myself with like-minded folks. Most dinner party conversations turn into a rousing debate on the future of web standards, who is going to be the company that unlocks the true power of personal data on the web and how we can mark our bits with emotional cues to make our web experience more human. I know what you are thinking. Tara’s dinner parties sound amazing.
But every now and then, I reconnect with old friends and even meet new people who don’t find a conversation on data rousing at all. They have other things on their minds and haven’t thought about cookies or the amount of data Facebook is collecting on us at all. The mere utterance of the phrase, “silos of data” kills a perfectly lovely conversation and, all of a sudden, they are checking their watches and making up excuses to move onto the next person who isn’t speaking in geek.
The problem with this scenario is that, as has been discussed here and many other places, ownership and understanding our personal data is important for everyone, not just the geeks. People spend an incredible amount of time on Facebook, Google, Amazon, Twitter and other websites, creating content and telling the world how we feel, what we consume, how we think and what we care about. And none of this belongs to us. I usually rile up a bit of a reaction when I mention that all of the time and energy spent is sold to advertisers, but the reaction boils down to privacy more than understanding how valuable all of that information is.
As Buyosphere’s goal is to help people gather their personal data about what they buy and own, I’ve thought a great deal about how I could communicate the value of knowing and owning your own data to non-geeks. At the end of the day, there isn’t a way of communicating this exact message because, well, it isn’t really a top of mind issue for most people. However, there are ways in which personal data driven organizations can demonstrate real-time value that will achieve the same results.
The answer came to me after making a list of all of the personal data collection applications I have signed up for – those I use religiously versus those I have used, but have since abandoned. Those I use religiously include: Runkeeper, Tripit, Foursquare/Gowalla, FitBit, Mint, Hashable, OKCupid, Last.fm and Foodspotting. Those that I love the idea of, but have since abandoned include: Hunch, Blippy, 23andMe, GoodReads, Plancast and Dopplr. I know that others’ lists will be different, but the point is that it allowed me to step back and really think about what sort of real time value I was getting out of gathering my own data – something I have to (mostly) consciously think about at the time.
I was able to boil the results of real time value down to three categories that, I believe, could be used to incentivize personal data collection for just about anybody – even those who aren’t self-identified geeks. These categories are:
- Utility
- Serendipity
- Self-Expression
In order to incentivize the continued use of any personal data collection application, you either have to REALLY excel in one of these areas or cover all three. Let me explain.
#1. UTILITY
Probably the best example of utility from collecting personal data is Mint.com. By merely hooking up one’s online bank accounts, you get a snapshot of where you are spending your money, how much you have left and get suggestions on where you can improve your financial situation. Mint.com was so handy for so many people that they had to do very little marketing. Their users became rabid fans and told stories to everyone who would listen about how Mint saved them all kinds of money, exposed fees that they didn’t know they were paying and helped them get savvier about their finances.
Utility in itself isn’t sexy, but if you make it incredibly beneficial and impossible to live without, people will pay for it. Utility includes things like:
- tracking (how much you spend, where you’ve been, how much you’ve consumed, when you did that thing you used to do last, etc.)
- augmentation (anything you can extrapolate from and add to the raw data that is helpful)
- organization (ways to sort and make sense of the raw data)
- visualization (a way to present the data so it is easy to interpret)
Utility is where TripIt won me over Dopplr. I thought Dopplr’s lovely design and serendipity-driven features were going to win me over, but at the end of the day, it was the usefulness of TripIt’s easy itineraries, flight tracking and augmentation like weather and maps that led me to use it religiously while I almost completely forgot about Dopplr.
A SIDE NOTE ABOUT ‘SET-AND-FORGET’
The ability to make it dead simple to get data into an application definitely helps with data collection and adoption, but it does not ensure engagement. In fact, without constant updates and reminders that the user has actual ‘set’ the data collection up, she will invariably ‘forget’ that she did so in the first place. And data without user engagement is, well, not incredibly interesting.
Nor is low user engagement monetizable (which isn’t the be-all-end-all, but it will ensure your personal data collection application will hang around to be useful for when this stuff becomes universally in demand). If someone isn’t engaged with your application they probably wouldn’t pay for it, and you can forget collecting advertising revenue. The only hope you’d have of monetizing would be to sell user data and that is the opposite of what our goals should be in collecting it.
So, yes, set and forget is a good way to make it incredibly easy to collect a user’s data, but it’s not real-time value.
#2. SERENDIPITY
OKCupid does the same basic thing that Hunch does: it asks the user to answer endless questions about their personal tastes and preferences. However, OKCupid has something over Hunch to incentivize users to actually spend the time to answer those questions: serendipity. And it’s not just ANY serendipity, it’s serendipity at it’s finest: the promise of finding love.
Things like answering questions about myself is kind of a fun notion…once. People take personality quizzes all of the time online, but when we get the results, what is the first thing we do? We share it with friends. And once our friends have done the test and we all compare notes, that’s it. We don’t really go back. Where it gets interesting is if these results lead us to discovering new friends, potential mates, cool stuff and ideas that could change our lives. And it isn’t enough to have this happen once. It has to uncover serendipitous moments over and over again.
Serendipity is also the core element that drives my usage of geo-location applications. A couple of months ago, I was in New York and checked into a pizza place near Union Square. I looked down at who had checked in recently and saw Mark Suster’s face smiling back at me. I had never met Mark, but I’d always wanted to and Foursquare allowed me to connect with him serendipitously in a place I never expected to. It’s moments like these that drive me to continue to check in even though it takes time and effort to do so.
Serendipity is, ultimately, how you use the data to connect people to people, people to things that may interest them and people to opportunities.
#3. SELF-EXPRESSION
There is definitely a utility in using an application like RunKeeper, but that’s not primarily why I use it. I can’t lie. I’m pretty proud of my commitment to my training and my progress with running. RunKeeper gives me that tool I need to strongly signal to everyone who follows me that I’m a runner. The more I log my runs, the more people I talk with who mention how impressed they are, so the more I log my runs. It’s cyclical.
Other applications signal personal tastes as well. Foodspotting signals that you are cultured (if you take shots of a variety of ethnic foods), healthy (if you post organic, vegetarian or the like), indulgent (posting desserts, expensive meals, decadent burgers, etc.) or the like. Hashable signals you are a mover and a shaker without being accused of namedropping. Last.fm signals whether you have hipster or hip hop leanings. I have to admit that I’ve been known turn off the scrobbler when in a pop music mood. Why make the effort to stop the scrobbler and start the scrobbler again? Because I’m aware of the signals I’m sending. I’ve heard several anecdotes from others that indicate this is pretty common behavior.
The self-expression or taste signaling dimension of our personal data collection has the strongest potential for creating the ultimate personalized web experience as well. It’s yet to be completely explored and I will be discussing the potential of emotional data in a future article. We are practically screaming who we are and what we like as we post our activity on social applications, yet most recommendation engines and data mining engines continue to put us in traditional demographic and psychographic boxes. It’ll be the combination of mapping emotional or taste data to stuff like products and check-ins with the ability to combine our activity from across social applications that will unlock the full potential of this.
+++
I’m looking forward to the day that personal data collection is part of the popular vernacular, but until then, it is up to us as the geeks and developers of the applications that help people collect these moments to provide real-time value.
