The Avatar Era

Let us look at all of the things which hold information about us. Our credit or debit cards track our payments and our location. We have multiple profiles on the internet, Facebook or LinkedIn, MySpace, online banking and any other login we may have; website´s we have subscribed to. We write text messages, emails, we post comments or general web content and much more.

By combining all of this information an extremely accurate profile of us can be created based on the type of sites we visit, the people we are connected to via these sites and the interest categories we fall into. Before you know it, your behaviour on the net has created a pattern that can generate accurate offers and requests based on your personality. As an example, Stumble Upon is a website system which uses this technique to match users to websites of interest, based on the categories they have ticked.

The problem is that not all of the data about you that you have posted on the web is necessarily aligned. So we land up with a whole lot of information matched to us, which is not accurate.

So how do you create an accurate representation of ourselves online?
You create an Avatar that reflects who you are. An Avatar is an online personality. You create an Avatar when you register a profile on a website. Is it not bizarre that you have probably created 3 different profiles on 3 different websites? In the real world we could call this split personalities, as they all develop individually. Essentially you should be able to create one Avatar profile and this Avatar profile is then used across different platforms. This way the data would be accurate and not duplicated.

...Now imagine you could control this profile, in other words you can see what information is being tracked and see how your profile is being developed (your interests, potential information you would be suited to, etc.)....

An example where this could be beneficial:
When you book a flight on the internet, imagine you would use your one avatar profile to login. The online booking system could match your Avatar profile to other Avatars who have booked flights, and arrange your seat via interests. So if you are interested in photography or a specific type of sport, you could be seated next to someone who might be a photographer or has similar interests.

To take this a step further, you could then use the same login to book your hotel, as you are using that same Avatar profile the hotel booking system would suggest hotels which match your interests, be that food, entertainment, type of beds, location ect.

Another positive reason for this would be protecting personal information. There are many new laws being passed on privacy. In Europe it is becoming a hot debate what information is allowed to be stored, and how this information may be used. If we use the above approach, and you are able to control who uses your information and for what purpose, we would be able to overcome this problem.

We at JGH are working on this principle with Ice Cream. The Ice Cream Network implements a one-user principle. Although we are not at this level yet, we are in the process of building the foundation for it.