In his post "Who Will Host My #PersonalCloud?"...
<http://www.discoveringidentity.com/2013/05/01/who-will-host-my-personalcloud/>
... Mark Dixon reviews his digging into personal clouds following an exchange with @Windley and myself on Twitter. He adds,
> I do like the concept of personal clouds. I have experimented a little bit with Phil’s personal cloud infrastructure at Kynetx. The orange SquareTag in the upper right area of this blog is an artifact of my little experiment to tag my social media places with SquareTags and connect them to my personal cloud hosted by Kynetx.
>
> But my question still remains: What companies will emerge as the leading hosters of personal clouds? I don’t want to host my own; I don’t think my wife, as bright as she is, would learn how to do it.
>
> I would like my personal cloud to be hosted by a capable institution I trust. I would like Identity credentials I select from my personal cloud to be recognized by every website I choose to visit, and I would like the payment method I choose from my personal cloud to be accepted by every vendor I purchase things from. That will require broadly accepted standards for Identity and payments and the large-scale infrastructure to make it work.
>
> I tend to think that it will take some pretty large organizations to pull that off.
>
> My vote for an institution to host my personal cloud? My bank. It already has a vault full of things that are like analog personal clouds – safe deposit boxes. I choose what goes in my box and what comes out. The bank can’t get it without my key.
>
> Plus, my bank provides a whole litany of payment options. And, I tend to trust them to take are of my money. Perhaps I could trust them with my digital safe deposit box as well. I’d even be willing to pay for it.
>
> Will they do it? That is another question.
>
So let's answer it.
For help with that, I'm cc'ing Adam Carson, who I know is on the list but might otherwise miss this. Anybody else in the banking business, or one with similar heft (e.g. PayPal, Amazon, Yahoo, Microsoft) is also invited to weigh in. In addition to everybody, of course. :-)
I believe personal clouds are sufficiently protean as a concept (and as code bases) that anything can happen here. Obviously we need one or more big players to handle trusted interactions at the B2B level. Whether they need to hold all our personal data is a different question.
We tend to conceptualize stuff in terms of containers. (Hence personal data stores, lockers, vaults, etc.) Naturally, we tend to look for help from the biggest possible containers, or trusted containerizers.
But all our data is *already* containerized, whether in our own hard drives, memory sticks or whatever — and off in the clouds of our many service providers, from health care to banking to retail. They are not integrated with each other, or with us. And that's the problem, the pain point, that personal clouds, perhaps alone, can solve.
That's because key, as Joe Andrieu put it well almost five years ago...
<http://blog.joeandrieu.com/2007/06/14/vrm-the-user-as-point-of-integration/>
... is the individual as the point of integration.
Identity, or what's behind it, also matters, because that needs to be integrated as well, and we're the only ones in a position to do that.
We are "committees of the whole," as Kim Cameron puts it. Who we are to our spouses, our friends, our kids, even to ourselves, at different times and in different settings, is many different people in many different roles. Keeping them aligned behind the first person singular pronoun is what we call sanity. That's why having our data, and our very selves, sharded off into multiple silos over which we have no control, is not sane.
So think of personal clouds as a kind of shrinking. :-)
Doc
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