It’s always been part of the matchmine mantra that encoding your personal interests and tastes in a portable MatchKey would benefit everyone involved. It’s obvious that users appreciate easily dancing among their favorite sites, knowing their preferences are following along. Content producers are similarly pleased with their ability to find their specific audience.

Beyond the borders of our community (defined by our partners and users), it’s gratifying to see others knocking on the same door. The most recent example of this was in a chat with fellow DataPortability Project member Phil Wolff, managing editor of Skype Journal:

I interviewed the CEO of a white label social platform provider yesterday. Their business for the last three years is you call them and they give you time-to-market for a private Facebook, 2L, blogosphere, whathaveyou. Lots of intranet, b2b, rarely a consumer focus.

They just finished implementing OpenSocial (such as it is). They think this is a move for flexibility and for interoperability. They don’t have an immediate need, but figure that when it happens, they’ll be ready.

The big payoff for their customers is that when they deploy next generation ads or services on a social network or other web site, that instead of someone just clicking through to one of their sites, the person brings identity and whatever else they like from their social graph.

My take: click based advertising will take a big hit vs. rich identity advertising.

It’s this last point that really struck me. I’d never heard it expressed quite so clearly before. In today’s In-Motion Podcast I host (along with Steve Greenberg), he expanded on this thought in light of discussions at the Ad:Tech Conference in San Francisco.

Two things struck me in the conversation. First, there is a lot of similarity between what he was describing and what Doc Searls et al. are up to with Project VRM (especially as I’d just spoken to Joe Andrieu about it a couple weeks ago).

The second interesting tidbit was Phil’s response to who else is building a “rich identity advertising” solution. To his knowledge, there are a lot of people talking about it (especially among advertisers who want to use something like it when it’s available), but few who are far along on a market-ready solution.

Of course, I couldn’t resist tossing a little plug for matchmine into the mix. After all, we’re alive and kickin’.