You can choose how people will want to get connected to you. I can choose for them to email me, text me; Twitter me, whichever way it goes. It will all be very much connected together and under my control.

Social Algorithms
The most important thing to make this work - if you think about how searches work today, there are search algorithms that can tease out what is relevant on a particular page. What we need are social algorithms that can tease out what is important in our lives. That comes from getting information like who do I email the most? Who do I call the most? Who do I call in the middle of the night, based on things that are going on in my life? It's this holistic picture of everything.

I think of it as this algorithm tapping all the implicit data that we generate in our lives, about where we walk, where we stop and have lunch. What do we actually order for lunch, based on our transaction history? Even the things we share with each other in Twitter, for example - a tremendous amount of information and value embedded in that. If we tease that all out with an algorithm, and start painting a picture of who is important, what is important, and when it is important, then, the algorithm says to you, "Hey, this is what's going on. Let me make a recommendation to you." At some point, it may feel 99% confident that this is the right thing and may take the initial step, waiting for confirmation back. The more you use it, the smarter it gets and the more useful it will become to you.

Open Platforms and Linked Accounts
In order for that connected world to happen, a lot of things have to be in place. Most importantly, it is this freedom of information to flow back and forth. Right now, if you think about closed communications - communications are very closed. Think of instant messaging, how they are very silo'ed and there is no interconnection between them. That is because the player sees so much benefit in holding onto these walled gardens, so to speak.

If you think about social networking sites, like Facebook, MySpace, Plaxo, LinkedIn, the whole gamut of things; they tend to be very walled off, also. But, your friends are never walled off. You want to be able to connect back and forth. In fact, I believe what we are seeing this year, with these new social patterns that are open, open social graphs, that it is a race to see who can be more open, faster than anybody else.

In the space of three days, this past year, Facebook, Google, and MySpace all announced open platforms. This is really them trying to figure out how to play nicely with everyone else. That is the beginnings of this; identity being very similar, people being able to control what their identity is and being able to say, "This is me on Facebook and this is me on LinkedIn," and it's the same person - being able to link those accounts would be the beginnings of that.

The Flip Side of Privacy: Permissions
Privacy is really important but the flip side of privacy is permissions. Whenever I have something that is private, it becomes not private when I give permission for other people to share with it. If I don't let anybody know about it, then it is completely private. It's not about privacy; it's about permissions. How do I control that? I think the social algorithm will start to help give you some more control over that, basically, making it easier to assign permissions; basically, doing it for you. The other question is; who are you going to trust to assign those permissions to? Who are you going to trust to have all that data in one place to do that job for you?
People are Key to Organizational Trust
When you trust an organization, you trust them as a big entity. We're seeing this shift, now, with social technologies that people, identifiable people, are being associated with that entity.

One of the reasons why I have tremendous trust with Google is that I know a lot of people there through my personal interactions. I also have that feeling about Comcast - Comcast, my cable company, not exactly a love-love relationship here. They drive me crazy because the service goes down all the time.

This past time when it went down, I didn't call the 800 number. I twittered and contacted Frank Eliason, who is on there with the name "comcastcares". I said, "My connection is down. I am texting you from my phone. Please help me." He worked with me; we were messaging each other. He got somebody to come to my house within 24 hours. I felt like I could really trust Comcast because I trusted Frank, who was at Comcast. I think that's going to be the difference in the future.

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