Your information is everywhere: at your bank, your insurance company, your mobile phone operator, the stores you have loyalty cards with, all the websites you’ve ever had an account on and probably many many other places you probably wish it wasn’t.

There are of course privacy issues with this distribution of your data, but perhaps more annoying to the average user are the inefficiencies bred by this “system”.

Your mobile phone number changes and all of a sudden you’re having to wonder if the your child’s school will be able to get hold of you in an emergency. Your dentist moves offices and because you’ve always been a cash customer he is unable to let you know where his new practice is.

This inefficiency is being amplified daily as more and more users move more and more of their lives online. What was once just internet banking has now become a myriad of services ranging from personal accounting to online dating. We shop online, we work online, we study online, we store large parts of our lives online.

The world has come so far… there are astronauts tweeting from outer space… we now have relationships with hundreds of businesses and likely thousands of individuals online…. and yet all this information is stored in the the private databases of your service providers. Flickr, Last.fm, Facebook, Twitter, Google Buzz, Linked-in… all ships passing in the night. If you think about it, they are only keeping track of half the relationship. There are no tools for you to manage these relationships from your point of view.

These relationships also last longer than we ever expected… like the y2k bug, the programmers behind your internet banking system probably never thought you’d still be using their software 15 years later. These relationships don’t even have to be as formal as internet banking to be long lasting. The business you booked that great vacation with 10 years ago is still in business but you can’t remember their name and you need a holiday.

As seen recently with the recall of millions of Toyotas, some relationships are more important than others and yet it is often these important relationships that are the most mismanaged. Does the company you bought your current car from still know how to get hold of you?

There is however a revolution happening. Users are starting to make choices based on the efficiency of their interactions and not solely on the financial implications. People want more time with their families and less time being frustrated by inefficient systems.

Unfortunately there aren’t always options and even when there are options the best you can hope for is a decent website or friendly call centre agent.

The world is wrong… and it’s ready for a revolution.