Continuing the line of thinking about personal APIs and personal RFPs, components of the broader trend in using algorithms to aid human decision-making.

Wings, Outstretched, Margaret River Mouth, Western Australia

Continuing a line of thinking from Powering Social Search through Personal APIs, referencing Scott Adam’s note on broadcast shopping, Doc Searls, Advertising in Reverse:

Here in the VRM development community we’ve been talking (and in some cases working) for several years on the Personal RFP. Technically an RFP is a “buyer-initiated procurement protocol” for businesses doing business with businesses: B2B as they say. With VRM the buyer is an individual. Hence, Personal RFP.

… In business, RFPs use an open protocol (essentially, formalized paperwork and bidding processes). Anybody can use it. We need the same for broadcast shopping. Any of us should be able to broadcast, in a secure and selective way that protects our privacies, specified goods we’re shopping for.

Why?

Every retailer and intermediary should be interested because the promise of the Net for buyers is not an infinite variety of closed silos, but a truly open marketplace where any buyer can do business with any seller — and on the buyer’s terms and not just the seller’s.

This, of course, is based on a subtle yet important mind-shift; Doc, on The Intention Economy:

I also believe we need to start viewing economies, and markets, from the inside out: from the single buyer toward the surrounding world of sellers. And to start constructing technical solutions to the buyer’s problem of getting what he or she wants from markets, rather than the seller’s problem of getting buyers’ attention.

Of course, the difficulty is in applying concepts for a better future to today’s practicalities; Alan Patrick, The contradiction inherent in the (Social Mediation) system :

The reality … is that no one individual yet has the market power to extract anything like sufficient surplus back to themselves to make this a rational economic instrument. In order for this approach to work it needs an aggregation system which is on the user’s side, and big enough to aggregate large numbers of users – and that means the aggregator ultimately must derive its funding from the user, not the commercial entity.

Not yet. But that’s why networks and communities matter, by creating the structures and relationships necessary to shift market incentives. That’s my hope.

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(More on the topic by Doc Searls: Intention Economy Traction).