The iTunes plug in iConcertCal illustrates a powerful model for utilizing identity data. iConcertCal takes the bands in your iTunes music library, runs a match against a set of live event calendar feeds, and populates a calendar layout displaying upcoming concerts by your favorite bands in your city (or any city you enter - great for travelers!).
Since I can only get to maybe 4-5 shows a year, iConcertCal delivers a huge time savings and reliability upgrade over manually scanning the LA Weekly, Pollstar, and/or the LA Times Calendar section for upcoming show listings for the bands I'd like to see (tangent: Arcade Fire, Of Montreal, The Police, Crowded House).
From an identity perspective, iConcertCal represents the way I expect all manner of preference driven apps to behave (but so few now exist):
1) it is completely automated
2) it leverages an existing preference repository (e.g. nothing to populate)
3) it returns data that facilitates a future transaction
Doc Searls and the VRM Project are developing models for applying preference in all sorts of ways and with the avalanche of potentially useful preference data getting loaded into sites such as Facebook, I'm looking forward to more apps like iConcertCal - apps that can come in after the fact and operate on data that is in place to deliver real value.
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