So ... yesterday we had a meeting with one of the TDs in the company (one of those "we are considering a partnership with corporation X" / "strategically it doesn't make sense for the corporation to do this at the moment").
I won't go into details (I don't want to be sued/I don't want to be sued/I don't want to be sued/I don't want ...), but it got me thinking:
at the moment, we're in the situation where we have a bunch of information gathering systems, all desperate to gather information about us:
We have systems storing (and data mining) search results, preferences, daily or moment-to-moment tops, ramblings, consumer statistics (like the Amazon thing with "Customers who bought these also appreciated: X, Y, Z), and so on and so forth.
They call all this "Web 2.0", "the web oriented on services/customizability/usability/blablabla" but that's another can of worms entirely.
What's important is that all these systems are merging, or something very close to it: the possibility of uniting your bills into one single item (for example), is very very close (at least in the locations with a very strong IT backbone).
The aftereffect of all these ... mergers ("integration" as it was called yesterday) ... should be a place where your store can recommend you the diabetics food (if you show up as a spike in the statistics of diabetics foods), traveling agencies recommending you the holidays you'd like and so on and so forth ... maybe even having your software learning your habits and taking over your repetitive tasks.
But that is the aftereffect, the "balance", the same way the aftereffect of centuries of authority-abuse by different monarchies led Europe to revolution in the 18th century and the adoption of (more or less) democracy.
Right now, we're in the dark ages of data mining and the dark ages of information infrastructure and of distributed systems and a bunch of other things.
... and the dark ages can be very destructive ...
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