"

That something would be VRM — Vendor Relationship Management. This is something more, and different, than an way of managing one's identities. VRM should equip the customer to actually relate to vendors, and not just to buy stuff from them. In order to do that, a high degree of control on the customer's side is required.

How do we do that? What form does it take? Is it code that lives in a card? Can it be operated by cell phone? Will it require a broker of some kind? Where do we start? These and many other questions are now on the floor at ProjectVRM , a new research and development effort by the Berkman Center for Internet and Society.

Help in launching ProjectVRM (and the thinking behind it) has come from colleagues such as Mary Rundle, who is working on anonymity, and John Clippinger, who first volunteered the Berkman Center as an informal "clubhouse" for the Identity Gang. Some will come from developers like former Berkman Fellow Dave Winer, who has been thinking about this issue, and whose track record at Making Things Happen is legendary. Same goes for Jeremie Miller (father of Jabber and XMPP). Also Joe Andrieu (whose focus is complex search) and Christopher Carfi, a CRM guru whose blog is The Social Customer Manifesto.

Many others also deserve mention (and I insult them by not listing them here), but none more than Steve Gillmor. To Steve, user-in-charge is a market fact, not a Web 2.0 buzzphrase. Steve has long seen that customers are not only the source of all revenue for every business (which will inevitably put customers in a commanding position), but that gestures are what will weave networked markets together at their atomic levels. We may not have our periodic table of gestures yet, but we can count on it coming." (Doc Searls)

If you want to see what's going to happen on the web for the next 5 years, watch this idea of "vendor relationship management" and "attention" era. You can't go wrong with these guys.