User Control (Score 1)

A friend of mine has come up with a pretty cool paradigm for centralizing personal information and then defining relationships with other folks that get access to the information. Basically, you have your big pile of personal information and you define specific data profiles (data filters) that you associated with each entity that wants your data. Only that filtered data is provided to the requesting entity. Its a very cool way to give the user total control (though it can be somewhat labor intensive for the user). Right now he has it powering a website for managing personal information and communities of contacts, but it could definitely be expanded to provide information to all kinds of service providers. Unfortunately, it seems to require a centralized service with a critical mass of people using it to be useful. Thus far, he hasn't been able to come up with a business model to support its growth and adoption. The grim reality is that it is going to be someone like Microsoft who will probably control this sort of thing if it ever comes together, not the user at all.

His site is azazoo.com.