VRM Capillary action, and thoughts in a similar vein

Confused of Calcutta has a post using the analogy of capillary action for both Twitter, and Open source/VRM

Re Twitter, JP notes, re music as an example:

So now all I need is for someone to build an app that scrapes what I am listening to, figures out what it is, goes and collects the enrichments and conveniences I want to send with the information (band links, YouTube, Flickr, Google, Amazon, the Facebook fan page, maybe a Netvibes collection of related feeds, the Wikipedia entry and so on) and then packages all that into a small space using something like tinyurl.

To an extent this is possible already, eg this blog has been published on Twitter (and Jaiku) since c July 2007via the Twitterfeeds application , it publishes the title of the post and the tinyurl (if you want to follow Broadstuuf on Twitter, the link is on the top right of this page or click to http://twitter.com/broadstuff ), so one could create an aggregation page and use Twitterfeed to publish (in fact one could use a blog as an aggregator quite easily).

As well as being a good way of sending data down thin networks, this also has some quite interesting applications for m2m and Semantic Web communications, as by reducing the message to smaller components it becomes easier to parse and parcel out.

(Incidentally, having observed JP's Twitter stream expand exponentially as the music posts hit the stream every few minutes, I can imagine a need for a whole lot of data filtering applications )

Re VRM, JP notes that:

...it would be worth looking at the role played by the opensource movement in making sure we can move around so freely between all these applications. Which brings me to a strange conclusion. More a hypothesis. Am I right in considering the possibility that VRM is necessary only because everything is not opensource? That good opensource obviates the need for VRM?

I don't think Open Source will do the trick on its own - it should make data more easily available to be taken and parcelled up, but in order to get the VRM applications themselves - the aggregation of user data, the capture of the conversations with vendors, the collation of datapoints - it will require new application development. In fact, as the propensity for providers is to be "CRM" focussed most of the development money at present is going the other way.

(Ironically Twitter, the subject of the 1st part of the post, is not really open source at all, whereas I would argue that email, which JP professes to hate in this role, is more so.....)

However, to take the metaphor into VRM - those millions of tiny capillaries aggregate into a major artery of demand - the lifeblood of any supplier - and deliver it into the very heart of the supplier, at (theoretically) lower cost of capture and higher commitment to buy.

And if that doesn't make their pulses race, I don't know what will....