Give a little, take a little

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Who owns your friends (or rather the list of who your friends are and how they are connected to you) has been a big source of debate in the social networking world. Control over that data is what makes social networks like Facebook, MySpace and LinkedIn so potentially valuable. Yet there has also been a movement afoot towards letting people take their friends with them, if you will, to other sites. In an interview with Tim Berners-Lee, the father of the Web takes social networks to task for hoarding data. The interview, conducted by Paul Miller, focuses mostly on the Semantic Web, which to Berners-Lee is all about linked data.

Paul Miller:

I think, it is a very grown-up thing to realize that you are not the only social networking site… otherwise it is like a website which doesn’t have any links out. In the Semantic Web similarly, if you don’t have any links out, well, that’s boring.

In fact, a lot of the value of many websites is the links out.

Now if you look at the social networking sites which, if you like, are traditional Web 2.0 social networking sites, they hoard this data. The business model appears to be, “We get the users to give us data and we reuse it to our benefit. We get the extra value.”

So, first of all, are they going to let people use the data? I think, the push now, as we’ve seen during the last year, has been unbearable pressure from users to say, “Look, I have told you who my friends are. You are the third site I’ve told who my friends are. Now, I’m going to a travel site and now I’m going to a photo site and now I’m going to a t-shirt site. Hello? You guys should all know who my friends are.” . . . So, the users are saying, “Give me my data back. That’s my data.”

The new site will fall right in line with all these ideas. Why in this day and age are we still having to fill out yet another profile form. This data is a user’s data, why the heck shouldn’t that have control of it. I think that user backlash for sites that don’t follow these principles will force sites to fall in line. This will be good for consumers in the end, as if the site your on doesn’t give you what you want, you can pack up your data and your friends and take your business elsewhere.

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This entry was posted Friday, February 29th, 2008 filed under: Api's, Data Portability, Dating 2.0, Dating Industry, Uncategorized by Andy