SXSW - A plea for f#%king relevant communications.

Vote for this talk: http://panelpicker.sxsw.com/vote/19775

A modest proposal for f#%king relevant communications online

Trevor Linton trevor.linton@mrmmccann.com

http://www.linkedin.com/pub/trevor-linton/28/619/a4a/ @trevorlinton

DISCLAIMER This presentation has not been condoned, approved, or sanctioned by IPG, its subsidiaries (MRM, McCann Erickson, etc.) or its clients. The opinions and ideas (and especially my language) in this presentation do not represent or reflect the views of IPG, MRM, McCann Erickson or its management. In-fact, I’m curious how my co-workers may respond.

This proposal has no other purpose than to try and convince you to vote for me to speak at SXSW in 2014. So if you like it, please, make sure to vote at: http://panelpicker.sxsw.com/vote/19775

As an individual, when it comes to privacy and personalized advertising, you could say I’m not a big fan. While writing this the NSA was accused of spying on its citizens, Apple faced a “nuclear” scale hack, and NBC reported the largest breach in history that resulted in 160 million credit cards and customers data stolen.

With new technology, comes new data. With new data comes new concerns. It’s reasonable to wonder whether new technology is even worth the risks. Even if you don’t mind annoying ads, spying, and privacy leaks you should know these stem from a much larger systematic problem.

It’s actually a pretty fundamental problem. Digital communications hasn’t seen any new features in over a decade. Seriously, when was the last time you saw a new feature to email?

I admit, throwing email under the bus is a bit harsh. What I mean is for the past decade we’ve relied and have come to expect that if we want more sophisticated ways of communicating we have to use centralized services (such as Facebook).

But centralized services have some problems. They are expensive to maintain. Start-ups are crushed by their costs. Developers spend too much of their time working on server systems, with on no visible features. And businesses spend billions each year on compromises. And users end up with no privacy, limited features, lost opportunities, higher costs, and little control over their identity. But the worst part? Ten million passwords to remember.

And even with hundreds of thousands of centralized services that allow you to communicate in more effective ways we still find ourselves using a decade old standard as our main method of communicating online.

Email’s usefulness is really in its ability to control information and in its transparency. People trust it. It also may help explain why people can be very hesitant to adopt new technologies.

This even affects marketing. Marketers use data collected in these centralized services to target or personalize ads. Unfortunately, more often than not they end up being more creepy than convenient. Bad digital marketing is like trying to figure out what food you eat by watching what restaurants you go to and smelling your burps afterwards. It’s awkward and unpleasant for everyone.

Privacy blunders, annoying ads, pop-ups, banner ads, identity theft and data leaks won’t go away without a better decentralized method for communicating digitally. And with new decentralized communication technologies we can do some really amazing things.

I could spend the rest of this presentation complaining, but I’ll stop and and propose a solution. This would be a pretty terrible SXSW proposal if all I do is b#%ch and moan.

INTRODUCING:

Couriering!

Couriering is a set of standards that let you, or an application, pull and push messages to people, applications or devices across a decentralized network. Sounds familiar? It should. That’s sort of what email does. Couriering just takes email a bit further.

You can almost think of Couriering as a latter-day version of email with a few kicks and twists. Calling it a new version of email is a bit of an oversimplification. So lets reframe from using any words like email 2.0. Lets look at some benefits.

#1 People, applications and devices can be addressed using couriers. So applications can send messages to other apps, on a specific device, instead of just an inbox. #2 There’s more functionality with pull messages. You can address large audiences. Literally, *@*.com is a valid courier address. Pull messages are picked up instead of delivered. So people can “follow” you. #3 All communications are encrypted. The validity of the recipient, and protecting your data is done using public-key cryptography, signing and trust chains (“vouching”).

#4 Messages don’t necessarily need to end up in your email box. The message can delivered to an application with information on how to use the message. #5 Messages can be very large, in-fact up to 4GB, so it’s possible to share all those home movies with your family without the need for YouTube. #6 It’s decentralized, transparent and backwards compatible with email. You pick your provider and who you trust. By opening your sent box you can see exactly what’s been done with your data.

Couriers believe in standards. They don’t require new servers and are compatible with existing email (IMAP/SMTP) systems. They add features without having to add infrastructure, augmenting systems, confusing software or new security policies. No new nightmare IT setups.

Couriers believe in being independent. Servers are unnecessary with pull and push messages, interactions between you and your social network are just that. Messages between you and your contacts. Information goes only to where you say it should.

Couriers believe in being anonymous. Messages can be placed online anonymously with routing methods to reply back to the origin without disclosing the actual person behind the mask. Want to sign up for a coupon online for $10 off chocolate fudge cookies? You don’t have to give away your email address anymore.

Couriers believe in security. Couriers validate identity and its trust level for every message that arrives. In addition they protect messages with public-key cryptography. Trust is established by certificate chains that allow you to vouch for people and control how they can communicate with you.

Couriers believe in simplicity. Couriers allow people, their devices and their applications to seamlessly talk to one another, even if they’re not on the same network. Any device associated with your identity can find all your other devices. This simplifies development. Developers can use functional messages to find all the devices associated with your identity, discover their capabilities and send and receive messages.

Some real life examples: Streaming. You and your brother want to watch a home movie. He lives in New York. You live in Salt Lake City. You have two options: A) figure out a way to send a large file, most likely that won’t be supported. B) upload it to a video sharing site, but if it happens to be a video of the birth of your daughter, you may not want the world to see it.

Some real life examples: Streaming. With couriers an application can easily stream videos to your brother. The application takes the video and asks the courier to deliver it to a media player associated with the identity yourbrother@newyork.com. This doesn’t go to his inbox, but goes to every device he owns. The devices negotiate who should handle the request and how. Ultimately it may ask your brother if the TV is the best option to start streaming.

Bull. Prove it. Couriers are services installed on your devices (phones, laptops, televisions, desktops, etc.) then associated with your identity (email address).

Courier That crazy internet. Your devices and apps.

Bull. Prove it. Specifically, they sit in-between your email and devices. They can send or receive messages hidden in email meta data and a few other things. When the couriers receive a message it’s filtered, so you never notice them. Since it’s based on email and other open standards, we already have a lot built.

Courier That crazy internet & email.

Couriers can send and receive to an app, person, or device. Messages come in different flavors: •  Short messages •  App-to-app messages •  Pull messages •  Large-data messages •  Time-to-live messages

•  Anonymous messages •  Urgent messages •  Functional message •  Identity messages •  Discover messages

You have questions… “Yes, many.”

“Some other real life uses?” Telephone Calls.

Their Courier

Their Phone

Your friend makes a call.

Their phone app tells the courier who, how, when, why and what it wants to do.

The courier on their device prepares the request into a “courier message”

Your Courier

The courier on the receiving device sees the message, checks preferences, security and requests and decided to inform its devices.

Your Phone

Your phone app negotiates with the requester for a Voice connection depending on the network and notifies you of an incoming phone call.

You answer. Or not.

VOIP telephone calls are nothing new, but simple to implement with couriers. By adding meta data the process, couriers can make some intelligent decisions about whether to accept calls. Your phone app rings on any devices you have a phone app installed on and associated with that identity. Only you and your friend have any logs of It happening. In addition messages sent from any device goes through one source that you choose, your email provider.

“So what’s some real life uses?” Telephone Calls.

So this is new. A lot of information can be stored in the meta data. Telemarketers can provide information such as the offering, intent, brand, etc. A user can specify what types of marketing they want to receive. They can even set the courier to auto reply with alternative contact methods or better times to reach them if they’re interested but don’t wish to be bothered right now.

“So what’s some real life uses?” Telephone Calls.

This is a crucial part. Couriers are reliant on one server, your email provider. This means only you, the receiver and your email provider have any record of anything happening. No one holds your personal data on their servers. Don’t like your email providers policies? You can easily switch to one that you like.

“What happens when someone doesn’t have a courier?” You would sit for a bit until your courier decided it couldn’t get a hold of their courier. It would inform the phone app that it failed and the phone app could backup to the regular ole’ telephone network system. In addition, an optional message can be sent as a backup that goes directly to their email inbox.

“Hm, another example please.” Ok. Making an instant message or text message application is easy. Couriers can send urgent, time-to-live or short messages to one or many identities that will be delivered to their favorite IM app on their phone.

“One more example please.”, OK. Couriers can send messages not only to people, but groups of people for a specific application. And with both push and pull capabilities. This reproduces the vast majority of the functionality and features of LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter without anyone having to register for anything or investing in servers.

“This, does not seem safe. How can I control my data?” Since it’s based on public-key cryptography all your messages can only be decrypted by the intended recipients, and no one can send a message pretending to be you without knowing both your private key and your email password. If your email is hacked, your messages are still secured. (Sorry NSA)

“This, does not seem safe. How can I trust couriers?” Validating that a message actually came from a trusted place is done with public-key cryptography and ensures that a message received can be trusted. You can also browse through your sent folder to find what messages applications have been.

“Why hasn’t someone already done this?” There’s no profit in establishing a cooperative standard. So don’t expect large companies to embrace it any time soon. It also makes some websites unnecessary and irrelevant. Most of this is knitting together existing standards to do a lot more than what people would expect. I think no one has done it because we haven’t had the need for it yet.

“What other features do couriers have?” A lot more than I have time to go over in this proposal.

“So. What’s in your SXSW presentation?”

1.  Overview of couriers, messages and digital communications 2.  How messages work, their capabilities and challenges 3.  How developers can program them (JavaScript/C++/C examples) 4.  How to provide better User Experiences with messages 5.  How to integrate them into existing apps 6.  How marketers can use them as a new channel 7.  Security, privacy and policy implications 8.  Sub-standards for a proposed standard 9.  Business possibilities and opportunities 10.  Implications to existing IT and systems 11.  How to contribute (RFC) 12.  Demo of applications using it 13.  How to start using couriers 14.  Cookies. I’ll bring some cookies.

Thank you!

If you want to learn more, contact me. And remember to vote for me at SXSW’s Panel Picker website. Otherwise this may not see the light of day.

Vote: http://panelpicker.sxsw.com/vote/19775

SXSW - A plea for f#%king relevant communications.

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