Kai is calling to you. She is calling to you to make her internet experience Fun, Social, and Engaging. If she uses your services today, that does not mean she will use them tomorrow. She is brand loyal, but your site will hold her attention primarily if it holds the attention of her community. Her group. Her peeps. Welcome to the fad.So say Microsoft who are now focusing some attention on the concept of "Customer 2.0". There's a more detailed description of the concept here.
Reality check required. We've yet to perfect "Security 1.0" for "Customer 0.5" so Kai can have no expectation of privacy or security until online security grows up and we can tell the difference between Kai and the umpteen individuals who will be pretending to be her.
More important than ever before is architecture, and particularly making sure that back-end business processes are closely coupled with front-end features, but also ensuring that the security layer provides strong, transparent controls around managing identities and access to functionality.
The danger, of course, is that in the rush to address the perceived needs of Kai, we'll end up chucking architecture out of the window and serve up products that look cool but lack integrity. The result will be that Customer 2.0 is superceded by a "Customer 3.0" who will be mostly untrusting of using any Internet based services at all....