Facebook, Google and the DataPortability Workgroup by Jonas

Last night I started a post about the data of social networks and their value. Fortunately I didn’t post it, fortunately because this piece of news changed everything.

Scott Karp wrote an interesting post on data a couple of days ago.

Before social networking applications, this data included the story of our personal relationships — sites like Friendster, MySpace, and Facebook provided a way to capture that data for the first time. These services are so valuable because they became platforms for capturing data that even Google, with it’s army of spiders, couldn’t crawl, because it wasn’t online.

The value of such sites as Facebook and Twitter is largely in their user data, that stores actions and relationships that previously haven’t been available to anyone, simply because no one was able to provide enough value for users to bring their social life to the web. These and many other sites have now succeeded with that and social networks is today the essence of the mainstream web experience.

Voices have been raised on why Facebook will not open up their data. The main point has been that data is only valuable in walled gardens and Facebook’s data has been seen as their silver bullet towards realizing $15 billion valuation, it’s been doubted if they have enough or any incentive to making the data accessible.

Today a helluva lot changed. By joining the Data portability group, the wheels are in motion. Umair is annoyingly well timed in his post and data seems to be on it’s road to being the commodity that he has foreseen and both FB and Google is realizing the difference between new and old:

Success isn’t determined by how hard I can exclude you from scraping your data - but how effectively and efficiently I can help you share/use/reuse/hack/etc it.

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January 8, 2008 / 1 Comment.

One Comment

  1. matt replied:

    http://www.adbusters.org/magazine/77/facebook_s...

    October 1st, 2008 at 6:46 pm. Permalink.

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