Youstice is a new VRM company focused on mediating disputes online. Says the home page, “We help customers and retailers resolve shopping issues quickly and effectively.” Here’s the customer side (shop with confidence). Here’s the retailer side (manage claims easily). And here’s the pitch to partners (“help retailers and customers globally reach resolution of thousands of complaints – all through one simple online application”).

Enable your customers to better engage and make them independent. Become a VRooMer! is a new blog post by Zbynek Loebl that nicely explains VRM and the context it provides for Youstice, which is in beta now. So check it out.

Fargo is the online outliner/publishing system brought to us by Dave Winer and friends. As a tool of independence and engagement, it has many VRM possibilities, methinks. I enjoy following it both in use (I often blog through it) and in the Fargo Blog.

Phil Windley‘s The Compuserve of Things speaks to a problem we all suffer but few of us examine: silo-ization. Phil starts by insightfully observing that Web 2.o, for all the progress it brought, did so at the expense of centralization around sites, services and data sources:

Each of these online service businesses sought to offer a complete soup-to-nuts experience and capitalized on their captive audiences in order to get businesses to pay for access. In fact, you don’t have to look very hard to see that much of what’s popular on the Internet today looks a lot like sophisticated versions of these online service businesses. Web 2.0 isn’t so much about the Web as it is about recreating the online business models of the 80’s and early 90’s. Maybe we should call it Online 2.0 instead.

To understand the difference, consider GMail vs. Facebook Messaging. Because GMail is really just a massive Web-client on top of Internet mail protocols like SMTP, IMAP, and POP, you can use your GMail account to send email to any account on any email system on the Internet. And, if you decide you don’t like GMail, you can switch to another email provider (at least if you have your own domain).

Facebook messaging, on the other hand, can only be used to talk to other Facebook users inside Facebook. Not only that, but I only get to use the clients that Facebook chooses for me. Facebook is going to make those choices based on what’s best for Facebook. And most Web 2.0 business models ensure that the interests of Web 2.0 companies are not necessarily aligned with those of their users. Decisions to be non-interoperable aren’t done out of ignorance, but on purpose. For example, WhatsApp uses an open protocol (XMPP), but chooses to be a silo.

He adds,

If we were really building the Internet of Things, with all that that term implies, there’d be open, decentralized, heterarchical systems at its core, just like the Internet itself. There aren’t. Sure, we’re using TCP/IP and HTTP, but we’re doing it in a way that is closed, centralized, and hierarchical with only a minimal nod to interoperability using APIs.

We need the Internet of Things to be the next step in the series that began with the general purpose PC and continued with the Internet and general purpose protocols—systems that support personal autonomy and choice. The coming Internet of Things envisions computing devices that will intermediate every aspect of our lives. I strongly believe that this will only provide the envisioned benefits or even be tolerable if we build an Internet of Things rather than a CompuServe of Things.

When we say the Internet is “open,” we’re using that as a key word for the three key concepts that underlie the Internet:

  1. Decentralization
  2. Heterarchy (what some call peer-to-peer connectivity)
  3. Interoperability

And concludes,

The only way we get an open Internet of Things is to build it. That means we have to do the hard work of figuring out the protocols—and business models—that support it. I’m heartened by developments like Bitcoin’s blockchain algorithm, the #indieweb movement,Telehash, XDI Discovery, MaidSafe, and others. And, of course, I’ve got my own work onKRL, CloudOS, and Fuse. But there is still much to do.

We are at a crossroads, with a decision to make about what kind of future we want. We can build the world we want to live in or we can do what’s easy, and profitable, in the short run. The choice is ours.

This is strong and important stuff.

Here in browser-land (where I’m writing this), Firefox has released a major new upgrade: version 29.0. Here’s an explanation. Firefox matters for VRM purposes because it’s the browser that’s closest to ours alone, and therefore in the best position to become a VRM instrument. The team there has also recently made hires — on purpose — from within our VRM orbit, and this is hugely encouraging. Oh, and they just put out this very cool video.

Same goes for WordPress. Gideon Rosenblatt‘s Automattic for the People: WordPress as a Regenerative Business singles out WordPress for praise as a paradigmatic example. He defines a regenerative business as a people- (rather than a money- or mission-) centric. So, in this respect, it helps to note that the main stakeholders in WordPress, Mozilla and Fargo are the people who put it to use. They are driven by us. This is more important than them being –centric around us. (This distinction is unpacked here and here.)

Regenerative business reminds me a lot of Umair Haque’s concept of thick value. Need to look more deeply into that.

Last but not least, dig Casius, which matches homeowners with pre-screened and qualified contractors in several European countries, so far: intentcasting, of a sort.

Looking forward to seeing lots of you at IIW next week.