지난주에 SAN FRANCISCO에서 열린 Web2.0 Summit 에서 미래 웹에서 영향력을 가질, 지배자는 Google 이 아니라 Facebook 이란 주장이 Founders Fund 의 Sean Parker의 ‘The Rise of the Network Company’ 에 의해 제기되었다. 그가 말하는 요지는…

Companies that harness the power of NETWORKS will dominate the Internet

COLLECTING DATA is less valuable than CONNECTING PEOPLE

즉,  웹 서비스를 아래와 같이 정보 서비스(Information Service)와 네트워크 서비스(Network Service)로 구분했을 때, 앞으로는 데이터를 수집(Collecting Data)하는 정보서비스보다 사람들을 연결(Conneting People)하는 네트워크 서비스가 훨씬 더 가치를 가지게 될 것이라고 주장이다.

정보 서비스(Information Service) 라 하면 위와 같이 Google, Yahoo, CNET , Youtube 등이 있는데 이들은 Network 보다는 주로 정보나 데이터를  모으고 처리하는데 Core Value 집중되어 있다. 반면 Facebook, Ebay, 최근 전세계적으로 이슈가 되고 있는 Twitter 같은 네트워크 서비스(Network Service)는 조직이나 사람간의 관계, Relationship 을 구축하는 것을 Core Value로 두고 있다. 네트워크의 중요성은 아래와 같은 Metcalfe’s Law를 보면 알 수 있다. 네트워크의 참여자가 많을수록 그 만큼 그 관계 속에서 발생하는 거래는 기하급수적으로 늘어난다. 결국 네트워크 참여자를 많이 보유한 쪽이 앞으로의 웹을 이끌어나갈 주도적 위치에 설 가능성이 크다는 것이다.

위의  Metcalfe’s Law 말고도 한 가지 더 흥미로운 이슈는 데이터 이동성(Data Portability)이다. 요즘 Open이라는 화두 속에서 오픈웹의 패러다임을 맞이해 한 서비스의 데이터베이스에 쌓여 있는 데이터를 다른 서비스에서도 이용할 수 있도록 하기 위한 다양한 노력이 진행 중에 있는데, 데이터의 경우 컨버터나 어댑터를 이용해서 그나마 옮길 수 있지만 사람을 옮기게 만드는 것은 아주 어렵다는 주장을 펼치고 있다. 즉, 자신이 맺고 있는 다양한 사회적 관계를 포기하고 다른 서비스로 옮겨가는 것이 훨씬 더 어렵다는 주장이다.

마지막 그의 전망을 들어보면, Google의 경우 지금의 영향력을 당분간은 유지하겠지만 점차 그 영향력은 줄어들지 않을까하는 것과 Facebook 으로 대표되는 네트워크 서비스가 앞으로의 미래의 웹을 주도하게 될 것이라고 한다.

source :    The Rise of the Network Company,  미래 웹의 지배자는 구글이 아닌 페이스북일까?, Web2.0 Summit

It’s Eve’s turn in the hot seat this week, as she takes us through the User Managed Access projects that she is working on. As if that wasn’t enough, we crack jokes that only make sense if you know bad 80s music and everyone picks on me for talking slowly. What more could you want in a podcast? We should be charging for this thing.

Show notes and download links here. 

Data Without Borders is a weekly podcast about data portability, online identity, information authority, and all kinds of other cool stuff.

It’s very interesting.

The regulars this week are J. Trent Adams, Christian Scholz, Elias Bizannes, Eve Maler, and me.

Check us out on iTunes! If you liked the show, or if you didn’t, please leave us a comment!

Data Without Borders is an updated version of the In Motion series that J. Trent Adams and I did back in 2008. I’m very proud of those, so give them a listen if you haven’t already.

Data Without Borders is a weekly podcast about data portability, online identity, information authority, and all kinds of other cool stuff.

It’s very interesting.

The regulars this week are J. Trent Adams, Christian Scholz, and me. Elias has mysteriously gone missing (after muttering something about Las Vegas), but Eve Maler generously agreed to stop by in his absence. We hope she’ll become a regular.

Most of this episode is spent discussing the work of the TOS/EULA task force that I chair – which is way more interesting than you think it would be – so I end up doing much more talking in this one than I usually do. Eve later described the conversation as “passionate“, which I have decided to take as a compliment.

Show notes and download links here. 

Check us out on iTunes! If you liked the show, or if you didn’t, please leave us a comment!

Data Without Borders is an updated version of the In Motion series that J. Trent Adams and I did back in 2008. I’m very proud of those, so give them a listen if you haven’t already.

In case you haven’t yet heard the news, Cliqset has officially premiered its public beta!

We think this release takes a giant step forward in making the social media experience more engaging. And we believe there’s something for everyone – users, developers and the open Web community.

For a quick overview of what’s new, see our private beta blog post which steps through some of the newest features. These are just a few of the features that we feel enhance the user experience and the best part…all activities on Cliqset happen in real-time, making the experience similar to how your conversations unfold in real life. But here’s a quick overview of some of our favorites:

- Update your status using Google talk (just add Cliqset to your contacts)
- Email your status updates, photos, and links while you’re on the go
- Integration with nearly 70 other social networks and services that enable you to share your content whereever you’d like
- Our new Cliqset Air app allows you to customize your activity streams in the way you want to view them
- Control who views and comments on your activities via Cliqset Permissions

If you are a Boxee subscriber, have fun with Cliqset’s latest app, which brings real-time conversation to your entertainment experience. Discuss, critique, and even hypothesize endings with other Boxee viewers while you watch your favorite TV shows and movies. Here’s more on that from the Boxee blog: Cliqset brings real-time conversation to Boxee.

And we are continuing to foster decentralization of the web and our commitment to making Cliqset a place of innovation and openness. For developers, we now provide full access to our real-time commenting and streaming APIs, making it easier to write real-time apps. And, if you are a Boxee developer, you should also check out our development library as we’re making available our real-time APIs for writing Boxee apps.

But, keep in mind that this latest beta is just the beginning and we won’t be resting on our laurels. As always, Cliqset continues to work hard to make our online community more and more irresistible. Drop us a line if you like what you see, or if you have ideas on how we can build the best real-time community on the Web. We’re here and ready to engage: http://cliqset.com/user/cliqset .

It’s a big day for Cliqset and the social web! Today, we opened up the new beta of our online community to a limited group of people to get feedback.

As the nature of conversations on the Web has been dramatically changing to mirror those in real life – centered around topics, location and audience – Cliqset is now all about your conversations, however they unfold.

So, what’s new in Cliqset beta 3? Frankly, a lot. Over the last few months, we’ve completely redesigned our website and have created a real-time community that makes it’s easier for users to stay engaged and follow the discussions that they find most interesting.

In our private beta, real-time conversations and activity streams are a focal point in the latest release. Users now have options for communicating and sharing online activities (like photos, location aware updates, bookmarks) with their friends and online communities, while also being able to track and update all of the third-party social services you’re on from one centralized hub.

Here’s what’s now possible on Cliqset:

• Quickly engage and discuss. Discussions and commenting are now all in real-time – unique from most social networks and services currently on the web – giving users a better way way to communicate and stay engaged in the discussion as it unfolds.

• You can easily pull in your content from almost 70 social networks and services. We now support Cliqset integrations with the most popular third-party services so you can easily pull your content into Cliqset (photos, status updates, videos, blog posts, etc.) from other social networks.

• We now have easier ways to share your content with other social networks and services, including Twitter, Facebook, Myspace, Identi.ca, Linkedin and FriendFeed. Users can update their status, and share photos, bookmarks, reviews on Cliqset and push them out to wherever they choose.

• And you can now share content that you discover on Cliqset with other social services you’ve enabled.

• Easily discover content and people by staying on top of specific topics with Cliqset’s granular activity stream filters. Users can select which types of updates they’d like to see in their activity stream including text, photo, comment, or blog post.

• Updates that include photo files or location details now show a thumbnail so that users can easily see the content without having to explore further and with filtering capabilities, find others who are discussing the same topics and activities.

• Greater control over how people can see and interact with information that you share.

Come join Cliqset. To be a part of our private beta, sign up and start connecting and conversing in real-time

On the heels of their local Ignite meetup, the Atlanta tech scene is gearing up for yet another cool event. On September 25, Jacksonville-based Cliqset is heading up to visit our techie neighbors in Georgia and participate in New Media Atlanta. We’re especially excited to sponsor the event because building a community is very important here at Cliqset and NMATL is helping to drive and support the tech and marketing network in the Southeast. Not to mention, we’re looking forward to that famous Georgia pie and Southern hospitality!

Another draw for the event is that it highlights the larger discussion around technology and social media and how that enables deeper more engaged real-time connections. We know businesses today are having a lot of conversations on and around the Web and we’re looking forward to hearing Chris Brogan, who is keynoting the event, lend his expertise in new media and emerging social technology to help businesses better understand the newest Web trends. We’re sure to get an earful on topics like how real-time search and social applications can facilitate greater customer engagement – particularly significant to us since our main focus has always been supporting easy and engaging conversations.

The schedule is packed with great sessions, so drop us a line and let us know if we’ll see you at the event (or after party). Or if you have anything you want us to ask Chris – we definitely are psyched to pick his brain.

I’m a firm believer that doing business over the internet opens up the opportunity to make positive change in the relationship between a vendor and their customers.  I think online commerce (and business in general) is moving towards a model where the “demand” side of the equation has more tools, more choices and therefore needs to be listened to much more closely if you want maintain longer term relationships (the most profitable kind of relationship) with your customers.

Running a business, I see this as an opportunity.  If you focus on delivering a great product, building a service organisation mentality and then put in place tools that allow you to engage in conversations with your customers to see how you can serve them better then you’re going a long way to improving customer satisfaction.  I also think the internet is a great leveler, it doesn’t matter how much marketing budget your competitor has, if they aren’t now focusing on what customers are saying then you have an opening.  This is simply presents you with a new way to innovate.

From a customer perspective, there is a growing movement called “VRM” or Vendor Relationship Management – the customer equivalent to CRM.  One of the people leading this movement is Doc Searls who was one of the authors of Cluetrain Manifesto which is a seminal work on the topic of engagement in the marketplace.  If you haven’t read Cluetrain, do yourself a favour and read it – everytime I pick it up I find myself subconsciously nodding my head at the ideas.  Doc is now part of an initiative called ProjectVRM that is putting in place a framework, standards and tools for how customers should engage with vendors.  I think it is a lofty ambition.  I’m interested in it, not because I necessarily agree with it (I’ll come to that in a second) but because I think this is the vanguard, cutting edge thinking in customer/vendor relationships and understanding these trending ideas should help you with making sure your business doesn’t get blindsided by them.

Generally, I agree with most of what ProjectVRM is about, but I think it is also a bit unrealistic in some of its principles.  I just don’t think you can “flip” the structure and order of the customer/vendor relationship.  Right now, most of the infrastructure for doing business and transacting is owned by the vendor.  Rather than building new tools and increasing the level of complexity, why not stick to the very principles that ProjectVRM proposes and then lean on vendors to ensure their infrastructure supports those principles.

Customer data portability is a big issue with what we do at Incite as is data ownership.  We’re responding to that and making available to our customers an API and some tools that let them get their data back in a very standard way (XML).  I think that’s the way to address the valid issues that ProjectVRM is focused on.  We own our systems, we’ve invested heavily in them, let us meet your customer requirements at high level (data ownership, data portability, etc) and then how about we work together to help you, the customer, get the result you want from the requirement.  That could be as simple as better documentation of our APIs or as much as our developers explaining why the system does things the way it does.

Again, I think Doc Searls is onto a winning idea.  Its something I agree with as a customer, but also as someone who runs a business.  I suppose my feeling about “implementing” this change is to focus less on tools and more on the relationship.  Let’s have a conversation about what outcomes you the customer would like to achieve and then let’s work together on getting those outcomes.  And once that’s done, let’s talk about our success together – let’s share that win with other people so that they don’t necessarily have to go through the same effort.  In my opinion, that’s the type of relationship that lasts.

Cloud based computing and data storage is something that I find fascinating. The whole concept of moving away from rigid hosting centres to a distributed system, where data just flows around the web and gets requested and added to by apps and services also in the cloud opens up so many possibilities. Where cloud based computing is going is anyones guess but this great article by Carl Hewitt on O’Reilly Radar gives makes a good assumption at where the storage of personal data could be going and identifies a lot of the issues that will arise around privacy and regulation (good read).

The interesting stuff on privacy etc aside, it was Carl’s description of personal ‘client’ clouds in particular that drew me to write about it. This is something I’ve been thinking of for a while; particularly with reference to the data that services like Facebook, Twitter, Delicio.us and Flickr store on my behalf. At the moment that data is hosted by each service provider in their choice of data centre and data from other services can only interact with it with the help of OpenAuth, Facebook Connect and other ID services I can subscribe to. What I’d really like to do is hold my data myself, perhaps in a client cloud, and make it accessible to the services I choose.

This led me to think; could services like Facebook and Twitter work on a cloud data model whereby they don’t host anything for you apart from basic identity mapping to enable you to log in? Once logged in your data would be accessed by the application (say Twitter for example) from your client cloud storage solution using an identity key so the experience wouldn’t change. As broadband speeds increase, storage becomes cheaper still and processing speeds go up this should be possible if the privacy issues could be overcome. Imagine being able to take real control over what data you leave behind and actually have the option to disclose data to applications to make them usable but then update that and keep it with you in your storage repository. Every user would have an API key for each web app allowing the services to continue to work when you’re not ‘online’ (although in this scenario you’re data is always online) so functionality wouldn’t be affected.

Of course Facebook and co. want your data to enable them to target their ads better. If we owned our data then we’d be able to allow them access to whatever pieces we wanted to release for advertising purposes. Happy with them being able to target you based on factors such as what sex you are and location but don’t want them to target you based on the last product you recommended? If you owned your data then that would be possible.

The ability to have all your data available to then share with other apps and mashups make this a very attractive proposition to me. I think we’ll begin to see web apps which leave the data on your hard drive soon (in fact there probably are some already), so how much longer till we take that a step further and put all our data in the cloud?

TechCrunch is reporting that the free version of Google Apps, Standard Edition, is no longer being actively marketed. Google Apps includes Gmail, Google Talk, Google Calendar, Docs & Spreadsheet, Page Creator and Start Page. There was previously a no charge Standard Edition and a Premier Edition for $50/user/year.

The confusion and panic is somewhat funny and interesting; well, for someone whose data isn’t entirely beholden to Google. I say “entirely” because my personal email is stored somewhere on the Gmail servers. But I digress.

In any case, it seems that Google has shifted from offering Standard Edition free for anyone, including businesses, to offering Standard Edition free only for non-businesses. Although any user, business or non-business can still hit the Standard Edition page and register for the Standard Edition offering for free. Well, at least for now.

So why all the fuss?

Two key concerns arise from reading the comments on the TechCrunch story. First, there is the general “how dare Google take away my free lunch” sense of anger. Second, and more interesting, readers are asking “what happens to my data?”

The free lunch argument is understandable, but hey, everyone has bills to pay, even Google.

The concern about data sitting in Google Apps is much more worrisome. Data portability, or the cost of exit, as Alfresco’s John Powell schooled me on, continues to be increasingly important day by day. The Cloud/SaaS proponents haven’t really addressed this to the degree that users feel comfortable with their ability to move from vendor A to vendor B and bring their data along easily. But you could easily argue that this is no different than traditional enterprise applications.

It’s somewhat surprising how much we’re willing to trade off freedom tomorrow for productivity today, a point that Redmonk’s Stephen O’Grady makes. The “Google Apps for Business” FAQ makes no mention of how one would ever migrate their company’s data off Google Apps. As a buyer, I’d like to know that the vendor has at least thought of this and provides some tools. It would give me a sense of comfort with my purchase decision. As a user, who isn’t paying Google a dime, I should also care about the cost of exit, but I’m willing to set aside those concerns for the free lunch they’re providing me. At least for now.

What about you?

Follow me on twitter at: SavioRodrigues

PS: I should state: “The postings on this site are my own and don’t necessarily represent IBM’s positions, strategies or opinions.”

Google has launched the new online service on May 2008 that allows the users to connect with their friends on different websites. The Friend connect is the latest and advanced technology social initiative service that has been declared by many internet companies to allow their users to connect with their friends in other websites. This mainly helps to break the barriers from one community to the other community which is known as Data Portability. That allows the users to share their information with their friends in any interoperable applications.

Friend connect attracts more visitors to the websites and brings the users along with their friends to visit the content of the website that increase the traffic of the page. It not only connects the users with our website but also brings the other users from the social sites such as Face book, Myspace and orkut etc which helps to communicate with our website. Users from other social sites feel very easy to share their information to their friends that elaborates the friends’ network. This also helps the user to see the activities of his friends going on other websites.

In Earlier, many of the Search Engine Optimization experts and professionals have their trustworthy on the websites rather than the other Social networking Websites. But the trends has been drastically changed by the Friend connect that results in bringing more traffic to the websites. Google promises the site owners that Friend connect will gives more visitors to the websites that make the visitors to stay for a long time. The content of the Website can be shared by the user in the social sites which makes other users attention to visit the website that rapidly increases the page traffic.

The friend connect offers the various effective gadget such as picture sharing, message board, reviews and member management. Among this the primary one is the member gadgets. It provides the effective features to the media and they are such as the user can sign up with yahoo, open Id, Google, and AIM. Friend Connect users can display their activities to the friends who exist in Google Talk, Orkut, hi5, Facebook and Plaxo. It allows viewing the profiles of members across other various social websites and finally assists in connecting other members to our websites.

Friend connect becomes the more popular and effective social services that integrates all the other social websites for the users to connect with their friends. The SEO professionals are thinking the friend connect as the junction for the social sites which helps to increase the page traffic in the websites.

BlogTalk 2009
The 6th Int’l Conf. on Social Software
September 1st and 2nd, 2009
Jeju Island, Korea

Overview

Following the international success of the last five BlogTalk events, the next BlogTalk – to be held in Jeju Island, Korea on September 1st and 2nd, 2009 – is continuing with its focus on social software, while remaining committed to the diverse cultures, practices and tools of our emerging networked society. The conference (which this year will be co-located with Lift Asia 09) is designed to maintain a sustainable dialog between developers, innovative academics and scholars who study social software and social media, practitioners and administrators in corporate and educational settings, and other general members of the social software and social media communities.

We invite you to submit a proposal for presentation at the BlogTalk 2009 conference. Possible areas include, but are not limited to:

• Forms and consequences of emerging social software practices
• Social software in enterprise and educational environments
• The political impact of social software and social media
• Applications, prototypes, concepts and standards

Participants and proposal categories

Due to the interdisciplinary nature of the conference, audiences will come from different fields of practice and will have different professional backgrounds. We strongly encourage proposals to bridge these cultural differences and to be understandable for all groups alike. Along those lines, we will offer three different submission categories:

• Academic
• Developer
• Practitioner

For academics, BlogTalk is an ideal conference for presenting and exchanging research work from current and future social software projects at an international level. For developers, the conference is a great opportunity to fly ideas, visions and prototypes in front of a distinguished audience of peers, to discuss, to link-up and to learn (developers may choose to give a practical demonstration rather than a formal presentation if they so wish). For practitioners, this is a venue to discuss use cases for social software and social media, and to report on any results you may have with like-minded individuals.

Submitting your proposals

You must submit a one-page abstract of the work you intend to present for review purposes (not to exceed 600 words). Please upload your submission along with some personal information using the EasyChair conference area for BlogTalk 2009. You will receive a confirmation of the arrival of your submission immediately. The submission deadline is June 27th, 2009.

Following notification of acceptance, you will be invited to submit a short or long paper (four or eight pages respectively) for the conference proceedings. BlogTalk is a peer-reviewed conference.

Timeline and important dates

• One-page abstract submission deadline: June 27th, 2009
• Notification of acceptance or rejection: July 13th, 2009
• Full paper submission deadline: August 27th, 2009

(Due to the tight schedule we expect that there will be no deadline extension. As with previous BlogTalk conferences, we will work hard to endow a fund for supporting travel costs. As soon as we review all of the papers we will be able to announce more details.)

Topics

As everyone knows last night Google announced that they are now supporting RDFa and microformats to add ‘Rich Snippets’ to their search results page.

Rich Snippets give users convenient summary information about their search results at a glance. We are currently supporting data about reviews and people. When searching for a product or service, users can easily see reviews and ratings, and when searching for a person, they’ll get help distinguishing between people with the same name…

To display Rich Snippets, Google looks for markup formats (microformats and RDFa) that you can easily add to your own web pages.

That’s good right? Google gets a higher click through rate because, as their user testing shows, the more useful and relevant information people see from a results page, the more likely they are to click through; sites that support these technologies make their content more discoverable and everyone else gets to what they need more easily. Brilliant, and to make life even better because Google have adopted RDFa and microformats

…you not only make your structured data available for Google’s search results, but also for any service or tool that supports the same standard. As structured data becomes more widespread on the web, we expect to find many new applications for it, and we’re excited about the possibilities.

Those Google guys, they really don’t do evil. Well actually no, not so much. Actually Google are being a little bit evil here.

Doctor Evil

Here’s the problem. When Google went and implemented RDFa support they adopted the syntax but decided not to adopt the vocabularies – they went and reinvented their own. And as Ian points out it’s the vocabularies that matters. What Google decided to do is little support those properties and classes defined at data-vocabulary.org rather than supporting the existing ontologies such as: FOAF, vCard and vocab.org/review.

Now in some ways this doesn’t matter too much, after all it’s easy enough to do this sort of thing:

rel=”foaf:name google:name”

And Google do need to make Rich Snippets work on their search results, they need to control which vocabularies to support so that webmaster know what to do and so they can render the data appropriatley. But by starting off with a somewhat broken vocabulary they are providing a pretty big incentive to Web Masters to implement a broken version of RDFa. And they will implement the broken version because Google Juice is so important to the success of their site.

Google have taken an open standard and inserted a slug of proprietary NIH into it and that’s a shame, they could have done so much better. Indeed they could have supported RDFa as well as they support microformats.

Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised, Google are a commercial operation – by adopting RDFa they get a healthy dose of “Google and the Semantic Web” press coverage while at the same time making their search results that bit better. And lets be honest the semweb community hasn’t done a great job at getting those vocabularies out and into the mainstream so Google’s decision won’t hurt it’s bottom line. Just don’t be fooled this isn’t Google supporting RDFa, it’s Google adding Rich Snippets.

The saga continues, although we am delighted to report has the whiff of being close to the end!

Another letter in from LinkedIn’s lawyers yesterday (the whole thing is being expedited by them now matching us in a move to using e-mail, rather than recorded delivery snail mail) thanking us for the additions we have made to our website which clarify we have no affiliation with LinkedIn and that use of the contact import tool may breach THEIR Terms of Use (but doesn’t stop you bringing your LinkedIn contacts over).

They mentioned also removal of the LinkedIn logo from our site, but we had already complied with this.

I am pleased that we’ve received thanks from them for complying with their requests, but we’re sticking to our belief that users of websites like LinkedIn, WeCanDo.BIZ, other social networks and webmail sites own their contact data and merely licence the websites to use it.  With that in mind, we consider it appropriate that users of our site can bring their contact data over form other sites, although LinkedIn still believes that mention on our site of this capability should be removed.

While LinkedIn offers the same facilitie son its own site, as their lawyer letter of yesterday states, “is very comfortable with how in conducts business”, we see no reason to remove the contact import tool or review our commitment to making contact data portable.

As far as what we do ourselves to support this belief, the WeCanDo.BIZ website has a contact export facility and we are currently working with CRM vendors to enable all WeCanDo.BIZ contacts to be taken over to CRM systems to be used how our members wish.

While on the subject, we’ll also soon be enhancing our Outlook contact importer tool; and also supporting registration on our site using Facebook identities, MySpace IDs, Microsoft Live identities and OpenID.  All should be in place by the end of May and we’ll post here when they’re ready.

Feel welcome to share your thoughts with us using the comment capability below.

Over the last couple of weeks Sprite (Coca Cola) launched an interesting reality-type program on YouTube called Green Eyed World, which will follow the nascent music career of a new artist, Katie Vogel, as she leaves her family in the UK and heads to the Big Apple, NYC. It’s typical reality format and also branded entertainment at it’s “best”.  I’m not a big reality fan, so I won’t comment on the content, but I do think the singer Katie Vogel has a nice, raspy, jazzy musical style. But I digress..

The interesting digital marketing tidbit here – is that YouTube (well, Google – as in one of the brands with a competing data portability product) has agreed to implement Facebook Connect, which will allow viewers to interact with their friends on Facebook and even with Katie herself while watching episodes. The fact that Google is using Facebook Connect can only mean that the two companies are open to the potential of the openness to a two way data portability relationship. Either that, or it was a big enough deal for YouTube – which  really needs the revenue.  Remember the history making data portability case implementation that rocked our world a few months back? …when CNN implemented it during the presidential inauguration? Well, this isn’t that big a deal, but it’s refreshing to see the mash-up of reality programming, branded entertainment, and social media data portability.  Kudos to the team from at Coca Cola Europe and FullSix for kicking off a global campaign in the UK and achieving global momentum. Well played.

Incidentally, this is a big change from Sprite’s early foray into social media via one of the first Facebook apps  in Nov 2007, which ironically is still there rotting away with 4 installs (i am one of them and know 2 others – ouch). One of the wall comments on the Sprite Sips page is most likely the best internet comment I have ever seen  – “This app is crap to the power of suck” – Lucy Peery . I’m making a t-shirt out of that.

Reminding you to add value within social media communities, earn respect…and have you pet spade or neutered.

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There’s quite a bit of discussion (not here yet) of “data portability” (DP). DP involves a user creating and controlling specific data, able to move it from place to place with ease. The idea is novel and forward-thinking.

Also, there’s what @alisamleo has labeled, a “paradigm of streams.” Basically, the web is becoming less place, more conduit as more people use third-party clients or sites to retrieve information that interests them (RSS, TweetDeck, etc).

These are great ideas. They keep the web a democratic place where vast resources can be accessed instantaneously. Unfortunately, to maintain that will take more work than most are willing to admit.

Why?

These streams of data and the portability therein are not only convenient for the user, but insanely valuable. Facebook (FB) already made their stance clear when they claimed ownership of it. Google makes billions based on a superior search of similar data.

The transition from radio to television should show us (big radio names became the only TV names) that media are not intrinsically democratic. Quite the opposite. The DP movement must provide value to these controlling bodies.

In a sense, they must grant license to the data and ownership to users. That may sound obvious or revolutionary, depending on your perspective (which is partly my point).

Without this value-add these streams will be diverted or blocked by too many. The interweb may be democratic, where all can prance freely, but the conduits or access to it are not.

Do you want to go back to walking miles daily for well water? or would you rather just turn on the tap? Because, soon, enough value will be found in the pipes and faucets to make access limited and/or expensive.

Cross-posted at Up the Drain.