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There has been a lot of talk lately about being in control of your own data online. This talk has arisen due to the various websites that revolve around the concept of a social network. MySpace and Facebook are the two best known of these websites but this is just the tip of the iceberg. Social networking online is not a new concept. To varying degrees, forum websites and going back further, BBSes, Compuserve, The Well, and Newsgroups are all instances of very successful social networks. They may not have been as focused and structured around the networking aspects as such websites as Frendster, LinkedIn or Plaxo but they still provided that functionality.

What is different now, especially when looking at a tool such as Facebook, is the shere amount of concentrated data that a single company has collected about a large segment of the online population. That scares a lot of people. It scares me and is the reason that I've minimized my exposure to Facebook. To a lesser degree, I have this same issue with Google as well, particular with respect to GMail.

I've been talking, although not blogging, about this issue for a couple of years and would have expected some serious progress towards addressing this issue by now. I often hear the mantra about "owning ones own data" but I have not seen a lot of progress other than being able to import/export data from various online tools and some ideas being generated on DataPortability.org.

So what have I been hoping to see develop in this space? I've been using the term "Persona" to describe a structured set of data and services that represent me or any individual online. I want my Persona to be completely under my control or delegated to a trusted service organization. Think "data analog to the banking system". I want that Persona to be my proxy to the online world as well as provide a window onto other Personas that interest me and provide a place for us to communicate and collaborate.

In a very real sense, I want to see the business model that Facebook is using turn it inside out. I want to see a lot of smaller service providers that make it their business to protect the Personas that have been entrusted to them. I want protection from spammers, data identity thieves and from marketing messages that are not of interest to me. If I'm particularly paranoid or technically savvy, I want to be able to host and operate my own data and services so that I don't have to trust anyone.

This is just a first entry in what I hope will be a long series of posts on the topic of Persona. Stay tuned!