We’ve been hard at work on the Serena Mashup Exchange, which will go into a live beta April 2nd at MashupExchange.com. If you’re really, really curious, you can see the unpublished alpha here. There are a few major UI tweaks that we’ll roll out in a few days, as well as upload some additional mashups and web services during the beta period.

We’ve also started to get some cred from blogs like Dennis Howlett’s Enterprise Alley at ZDNet, talking about our platform, HiveLive. We chose HiveLive because their SaaS platform is uniquely tailored to our goals – i.e. we want to enable people to interact with each other, and have the data be a scondary considerations – an artifact of their interaction rather than the focus!

It may seem like a nit, but it’s a true difference between their platform and others. Nothing shows this more than when you attempt to set up data types on HiveLive. Several other vendors we examined in this area wanted 30+k in consulting to simply create a new posting type – let’s say a mashup listing data type which has a zip file containing the actual mashup, a few text fields with descriptions, some images, a video etc. – all of which is a “Mashup Listing”. In other systems, the data types are at the center of the application, and are not easily modified, whereas in HiveLive the people are the center, and data types are easily modified around people’s needs.

Simply put, this means a much more relevant system that saves us thousands of dollars and enables much deeper self-serve configuration rather than customization, which is the bane of all implementation efforts.

IBM, Novell, and Parity Communications are talking about blind encryption to allow internet surfers to anonymously visit, and indeed transact with sites.

Of course, their project is the right thing to do, in terms of privacy, security, and in keeping the status quo.

Now – the “status quo” statement above should make you think. Isn’t that changing the “status quo?”

Before the digital tech era, the “web” era (so let’s say 10 years ago for the average person) people couldn’t effectively track all of your purchases, what you looked at, where you went and what you were interested in, and then target you with advertisements.

Anonymity was the status quo.

Now – let’s consider why this effort is doomed in terms of commercial success. Even a nascent system, such as e-commerce over the web, has built up powerful interests and requires a somewhat stable transactional model. Today we know the game: You come to my site, I track you and entice you to disclose, I advertise to you, and then I sell you something (eventually).

If I can’t track you, and can’t profile you, and don’t know what you bought, and actually am thwarted from developing ideas about you, then my model is in trouble.

No web merchants are going to participate in transactions with this type of system voluntarily, and most will oppose it if necessary.

So success for this effort demands massive demand for incremental privacy from people like you and me, which history has shown virtually never happens — not for privacy or any other perceived incremental advancement.

There are a bunch of caveats, and there are ways that this could work, and I would love for that to happen.

But I’m not waiting around.