I wrote this this morning in a notebook as a follow up to my post yesterday… and since I don’t have time to clean it up now, I thought I’d present in raw, non-sensible form. Maybe there’s some value in a rough draft:
It’s like giving our money to a bank and having them turn around and sell our data to try to upsell us on loans and all kind of … oh wait, but the key difference is if we do get fed up, we can take our money out and go elsewhere, depriving the bank the ability to both target us with their partners’ ads and the ability to compound interest on our savings.
We need data brokers introduced into the system — organizations who are like safety deposit receptacles for our data — and who speak all APIs and actually advocate on our behalves for better service based on how “valuable” we are — this is necessary to top the scales in our favor — to reintroduce a balancing force into the marketplace because right now the choice to leave means dissing our friends — but if I’m not satisfied but still want to t talk to my friends, why can’t I be on the outside, but sending messages in? hell I’m willing to pay — in momentary access to my brokered personal profile — for access to my friends inside the silo. This is what Facebook is doing by shutting down so many accounts — it’s not personal — it’s protecting its business. They don’t want to become a myspace cesspool, succumb to empty profiles and Gresham’s Law — overrun with spam profiles and leeches and worthless profile data — a barren wasteland for advertisers who want to connect with that 8% of their customers who make up 32% of their revenue.
No it’s in data fidelity, richness, ironically FB took it upon themselves to weed out the bad from the good in their system-wide sweeps. Unfortunately they got it wrong a bunch of times. If Facebook allowed the export of data and became a data broker for its users — provided some citizen agency to its customers — there would be economic — as well as social — benefits to maintaining a clean and rich profile — beyond just expressiveness to one’s friends. For better or worse, FB users have a lot of benefit through the siloed apps of that F8 platform — but the grand vision should be closer to what Google’s marketing department christened “OpenSocial”… still though , the roles of banker and broker have yet to be made explicit and so we’ve leapt to “data portability” for nerds, forgetting that most people 1) don’t care about this stuff 2) are happy to exchange their data for services as long as their friends are doing it too 3) don’t want to be burdened with becoming their own libertarian banker! Dave Winer might want to keep everything in an XML file on his desktop, but I know few others who, IRL, feel the same way.
Thus concludes my rough notes.
So, if Facebook were perceived as a big Data Bank in the sky, how would that change things? Would people demand the ability to “withdraw” their data? Does the metaphor confuse or clarify? In any case, what is the role of data banks and data brokers? Is there a difference if the data container leverages the data for their own benefit? If they sell advertising and don’t provide a clear or universal means to opt-out? And what’s in the way of making more “benevolent” data vaults a reality — or how do we at least bring the concept into the discussion?
I have no personal interest the concept, only that’s a viable alternative to the siloed approach is missing from the discussion. And going back to the business models of OpenID and other identity providers… well, if any, that’s it. It’s like having a credit card with access to no credit — what’s the point? And OpenID becomes more valuable the more data capital it has access to. Or something like that.
Oh, and I’d like to quote something poignant that Anders Conbere said to me today in chat:
I was talking with my friend the other day and I tried to explain to him, that what I fear about facebook that I don’t fear about pretty much any other vendor is it’s continued developement as a competing platform to the web. a locked in, proprietary version and what I see, is just like Microsoft leveraged Windows as a “platform for application developement” facebook is doing that for web developement. what it offers developers is the simplicity and security of a stable developement environment at the cost of inovation because as we’ve seen, as market share grows, the ability to inovate decreases (since your success is tied to the backwards compatibility of your platform) and I see the possibility of facebook becoming a dominant platform for web application developement which will in turn lead to two decades of stagnation
So yeah, put that in your bonnet and smoke it. Or whatever.
Factory Joe 