First of all, you are awesome!

Thank you so much for adding such great insight. I have been talking to a number of marketers to try and crack this but and it is great to get some insight from more people.

In response to your first point, whether or not it is legal to mine “friend of a friend” email addresses, I think this will be murky waters for marketers. There has already been a backlash by consumers against unsolicited emails, I can only imagine what would happen if marketers leveraged the social graph for the purpose of direct marketing (at least in the form of email). Please keep my me updated on your research. I would love to hear more about how relational connections can be leveraged for consumer insight.

In regards to your second point, I am still a bit fuzzy on how data as currency can be a useful concept for marketers. I love the notion of a data bank that stores all your information, and the notion that you can use this bank to feed various other platforms, but I am still unclear why marketers should care.

I am going to marinate on that second piece for a little while. I am probably going to write a piece for iMediaconnection on this subject so any other input would be great.

1) It examines the relationship a user, vendor, and advertiser has over a user’s data. Our Policy action group is looking to answer some tricky questions like what is data and who owns what. For example – the e-mail address of your friend in your addressbook: who owns that? And what rights do you have over it, if your friend owns it? We’ve been researching into this type of stuff – looking at European law, international accounting standards and I’ve even dug into my old university text books on database theory, marketing and statistics! The outcome of our research will be a a sort of policy blueprint, that will have large implications to how vendors use customers data.

2) Interoperability. The DataPortability project is about opening up silos and making them work together. An explanation Chris Saad and myself have used to the media so far is the analogy of Wi-Fi: think how with the flick of a button you can connect wirelessly to the internet (and is because of some heavy standard setting back in 2000). Imagine being able to do that with your data – you can access it anywhere. So imagine storing your data in a bank, and using electronic funds you can transfer it to multiple applications at the click of the button. Data is the currency of the information age – and marketers I imagine follow the consumer where the data is. This data is now going to be distributed across the web.

I am sure there are more, but I’ve got to run!