Offerbots are offer-processing tools which are federated, general purpose and individually controlled.
Offerbot
The word ‘offerbot’ is a noun. It describes any tool, made by any person, which processes offers in a way which is consistent with the concept described on this site. Over time, this concept will be consolidated into a public standard.
Offer processing
Offerbots provide external offer processing by:
- representing our offers and social network as data,
- sending offers (with our choice of other offerbots) via the web or other protocols,
- receiving offers from other offerbots,
- storing received offers,
- applying processing (algorithms) to stored offers in order to filter and prioritize offers, and
- representing a subset of received offers to its owner (you) using any format (a web page, email, text, app view, app notification, etc.).
Federated
Offerbots are federated, meaning that they:
- conform to a standard for interoperability, and
- are distributed (such that each person and organization will have their own offerbot):
General Purpose
An offerbot allows any offer to be made to any other person or legal entity. This means describing offers as linked data (using any context to define concepts) which can be shared with other offerbots via the web and other protocols as needed (e.g. BLE for making and receiving offers locally).
Offers may be made publicly or privately with any party and are signed for authenticity.
An offerbot allows any offer to be received from any other party, either directly or via any other offerbots acting as proxies.
Received offers can be stored, combined with other information (e.g. the social network represented in your offerbot) and processed in any way. This means that received offers can be filtered, ranked and either represented as any map (on any device), and/or shared with any other offerbot using any protocol.
This sharing of offers between third-party offerbots allows us to benefit from decentralization (over and above a distributed layer of operation) in which offerbots can make offers of offers and maps. That is, offerbots can use their surplus processing power to gather, preprocess and instantly deliver a set of offers or a map to another offerbot (and its owner) who are looking for them. These offerbots with surplus processing power can, therefore, act as supernodes in the system on an altruistic or commercial basis (where supernodes sell information to buyers rather than sell buyer attention to vendors).
Individually Controlled
An offerbot is controlled by its owner and by no other party, allowing each person (and not an aggregator) to control the allocation of their attention and determine how their data is used.
To be individually controlled, offerbots must be:
- open source (such that individuals can understand and modify their operation),
- general purpose (such that individuals can safely install and run any offer-processing code of their choice),
- hosted on processing which its owner controls (because they pay for the hosting of their offerbot with a trusted offerbot host or it runs on a device which they already own and control).
Next: The Purpose of Offerbots