Tag Archives: user data

Your data. YOUR.

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In light of some of the more recent things that have been happening…

I really have to get a couple things off my chest. Also, it’s kinda funny how all this flurry of activity is happening as I’m trying to do more research in this area of web applications.

HanMeta is embarking on creating a service that might ease or further instigate the situation. More on that later.

User data should be the user’s.

It is my firm belief that people should own their own “stuff”; physical stuff as well as digital data. Sounds pretty trivial, but in terms of data, this isn’t happening. Silos are building up, where information is just begging to be freed.

Some services are offering APIs to facilitate this, but the larger players (both Facebook, AIM, and Google, as well as others) aren’t playing ball with the standards bodies. They’re moving towards it, but we’re only getting a subset of the data.

Now, am I advocating all-out accessible stores of data? I think I might be. I don’t want to get inundated with comments in the future when this isn’t the case… But I feel as though this makes the most sense to me as I sit in this chair today.

I feel like in the future, all people will have access to all their data at all times. Be it through some kind of external device like a PDA (or some kind of breakthrough Internet device… coughiPhonecough) or some kind of internal device like an embedded chip, we will constantly be connected to the Internet. It would send data like where you were standing or what your friend’s dinner plans looked like.

That is the future I want. It would be a privacy nightmare if incorrectly implemented, but this future is likely. Heck, it’s already here: It’s just not used by the majority of the population just yet.

Internet is distribution. Just like how the rest of the Internet would run just fine without Google (although, it’d be a little messy getting around) and its servers, there are standards in place for how routers should be passing packets around from senders to receivers.

The point that I’m trying to make is that there should be a place for a person to have their data “in the Clouds”, but there should be an ability to take that data elsewhere. Like taking your money from a bank and moving it to a cooler bank 2.0.

Did I just freaking type “bank 2.0″? [svn co hari-kiri]

Services having user data is a privilege, not a right.

Services should be providing the people with information that can be based on that data. Services should NOT bully people into using a crappier service just because the data is stored there.

Now I’m not saying the services should never retain the data. However, I feel as though the ability to take your data out of any service is very important.

For example, let’s say there was a site that tracked all the movies I’ve seen. If this information was open (APML, it looks like) I would be able to add to this data from movie rentals at Blockbuster, match it up with IMDB, and have it available on my Flixster Facebook Application.

The long stretch: RIAA and Facebook

Competitive advantage by locking out users to use your service… This is just like the MPAA/RIAA/Every OTHER Freaking Middleman Media Company wanting control of people’s “stuff”.

I feel like in this digital age, all of this is retarded. All this effort will be made pointless due to the fact that your users, your customers, want to do so much more with their stuff. They want to do mashups with their music and anime shows, have their favorite song playing on their profile (with no legal constraint), be branded by their favorite computer company…

I should be able to export all the email I have from Gmail and take it to another service if I wanted to. But I have no reason to, because Gmail is far better than anything I’ve used previously, and I don’t have any glaring issues with it to look for an alternative. This is where services will win: Make it awesome.

What happened with Scoble and Facebook

Scoble was trying to import names, birthdays, and email addresses of his friends on Facebook to Plaxo by using their optical character recognition technology. Which got his account temporarily disabled, and he got it back soon after agreeing not to run the script again.

My two cents: this is pretty borderline stuff. Scraping pages have always had a stigma because it’s a not-so-normal way of getting to the data. I had no problems scraping course data from the University of Illinois course page (of course, later I found out that there was an XML version of it… that’s besides the point) because there was no way of getting to it other than by scraping. But here, this was flagrantly against the Terms of Service.

Services like FriendCSV abides by the ToS by getting only the data that is accessible by the API provided by Facebook. But what Plaxo did was gutsy: they attempted to break open the Facebook silo.

Is this legal? Well, it did go against Facebook’s ToS and therefore I’m more willing to side with Facebook. But should that last question even be valid, meaning shouldn’t this data already belong in the hands of users to being with? I don’t know. It’s hazy.

Facebook owns the mapping of people to people. There is no doubt in my mind that Facebook has got people together into a huge social… dang it… “graph” (sigh). That is amazing. It’s what they’ll do with this data that’s going to be even more amazing.

So… HanMeta?

The project at HanMeta is trying to merge the silos just a little bit. Initially, we’ve decided to take a bite out of statues. To capture birthdays, names of family members, number of McRibs eaten this past McRib season (4, by the way), maybe even email addresses for the networks that gives us that data… that’ll all come later.

But after all is said and done, our data will be portable. I don’t intend on holding back the Internet any more. I would like to create a network using as many open standards as possible (dataportability.org).

It’s just the question of when this will happen. Most of our resources at this early stage will be used up on actually getting this information and ensuring privacy limits are set correctly.

I’m feeling a bit like Skullbocks…

If you get that reference, I should give you a cookie.

Are we building a Synapse? Uh oh… heh.