I attended the ISOC INET conference yesterday. A few people asked me: What is TrustFabric?
This is my current 2min summary:

TrustFabric is two things:

1) A Personal Information Management system (PIM)

One place to keep your personal information. An easy way to selectively share your personal information. Think: better way to fill in forms.

2) A Vendor Relationship Management system (VRM)

The other half of CRM. A way for you to keep track of the relationships you have with vendors and service providers you buy from. A way to keep track of the information you shared.

Obviously it’s a classic case of the whole is bigger than the sum of the parts. To do the two things above we have to build on a few other concepts: Identity. Security. Authenticity. Web of Trust. Open Source. Open Standards. Extensibility. Distributed network design. The list goes on, but you get the idea.

What TrustFabric is NOT:

The most frequent wrong assumption is that we are yet another web service which collects personal information, retains personal information and then sells this information to 3rd parties. No, no, no and no.

We’re not a centralised web service.. the idea is that you can run your own instance of TrustFabric (an Agent), in a bunker, under the sea. It’s a distributed system. We never collect your personal information.. it’s your information, it’s inside your Agent. We don’t retain your information. We can’t sell your information because we don’t collect it.

I hope these three ideas make TrustFabric easier to explain to your friends.