The personal information economy

The future laboratory reporting:

People are sharing information at an increasing rate: what they like, how they feel, what they have bought and where they are. In 2010, according to IDC, web users created 900 exabytes of personal information. To put that in perspective, six exabytes is what you would have if you sequenced the genomes of every person on earth. More than 100 million active Twitter users produce 230 million tweets a day, while Foursquare’s six million users checked in at more than 380 million locations last year alone.

“The internet has evolved from a web of pages into a web of people. The next step in its evolution is to become a web of the world, in which every piece of data is attached to whoever created it”

The result of all this sharing is that the internet has evolved from a web of pages into a web of people, to borrow the words of Microsoft’s Marc Davis. The next step in its evolution is to become a web of the world, in which every piece of data is attached to whoever created it, who they know and where it was produced. Some of the most prominent companies on the planet – Facebook and Google to name two – are almost completely dependent on their user base (and what they know about it) for commercial gain.
When you write someone a letter you don’t expect the postman to open it, read it, see that you mention a potential beach holiday in Europe and slip in a coupon for cheap flights to Spain before resealing it. But that, in effect, is what free web-based email services do with your messages. Anyone who uses free services like these is not so much a customer as a product.
 ...The future
As a result of the growth of personal reputation services such as PeerIndex and Klout, consumers are beginning to measure influence and reputation in greater detail, and those who possess significant influence online are starting to see value attributed to it. This will give rise to a personal reputation economy, where an influential personality can earn cash by marketing their reputation to brands. Services like Empire Avenue are already gamifying reputation measurement by letting people watch their share price rise and fall on a ‘social stock market’...

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