Why?

Service providers tend to confuse personal identification as a prerequisite to offering a personalized service. This is the kind of confusion that leads to questions like “what’s your name?”, “where do you live?”, “how old are you?”, etc. when all they really need to know is “do you need a key to get you back in again?”

The world got too excited about social networks. Now every time I want to try out a service, it wants to know my dating status. (I’m married dammit, leave me alone.) Stupid questions like these lead to distrust and bailout.

Here’s a question all application developers could stand to ask: Are we providing an identity service? If the answer is “yes,” then good for you! Let me know if you need some cheerleading. If not, go easy. Not only do you not need my identity, I’d argue that whole segments of apps don’t want it.

Take a look at Health 2.0 and, more specifically, [portable] medical records. The privacy risks involved are very real, very obvious. Far more so when you take a set of hyper-sensitive data, store it centrally, and then make it personally identifiable.

What if it wasn’t?

Maybe your news aggregator doesn’t need to make my attention preferences personally identifiable either. Just a thought.

Richard was diagnosed with diabetes in November. (Hopefully, the beer and sugar he’s cutting back on isn’t what fuels his writing.) Tonight’s post, which is a quick review of health information sites deployed with Web 2.0 traits, is no doubt being spurred by some personal research.

I’m always interested to see posts related to the field of online wellness, especially when they come from smart end-users. But I hate the label [Health 2.0]. We haven’t seen sufficient innovation or even interest in the category to suggest we’re experiencing any kind of next generation momentum.

Getting there means addressing three topics:

1. Reliability
The sites mentioned in both Frank’s and Richard’s posts generally do a good job presenting health information results. But all of them have a long way to go before they gain the trust that WebMD has earned. Interface improvement alone isn’t enough to make health information more useful.

2. Trust
Sites like DailyStrength have updated the idea of the online support group by turning discussion boards into social networks. It’s a great experiment, but your personal health status is not social. The personal nature of the topic means community members maintain a great deal of anonymity. How do you trust the advice generated by anonymous members? Think Fight Club.

3. Motivation
We’ve done a lot of work with personal health assessment / tracking devices. The issue with these is that nobody wants to use them. We’ve been providing these services to large organizations like the NYC DOH for four years now, and participation depends very heavily on outside motivation (e.g., cash).

Make it past these issues, and you’ve got something worth a label. The positive here is that the field is wide open. If you have ideas, the web could use them.