A few older posts and links to clean out… I was assuming Jeff was going to comment on some of these.
Recently, facebook did something I’d never thought they would do: They joined Google and a collection of other social network providers in participating in Data Portability (yes, I know, joining and actually doing something are two completely different things).
Wired ran a piece back in August about opening up social networks. A good synopsis of the problem space can be found here.
I wholeheartedly believe that Open wins. The users should be the owners of the data the social aggregators like facebook help them gather (they benefit by having access, not buy owning the data themselves). However, I also believed that facebook would never have the incentive to open it willingly; that only by pressure from open competitors would they themselves have to open up. I’m not sure what having a rep on the Data Portability board will do as far as influence, but it is without doubt a step in the right direction.
Its all about stove pipes and walled gardens…