27 May 2008 - 13:01Freeing our data

I was reading this post on BW’s Blogspotting and at first I agreed with it, maybe in the future the companies that currently hold our data to release it to the outside so that it can be mashed-up with other data that we have created and that is stored in other applications.

A pretty nice picture of the future, but I don’t think anymore it will happen at a large scale because I think that data is the primary way that a company uses for binding an user to its services, an issue that I have briefly touched upon in this post. If the datastores get opened then the cost of user migration from one service to another goes down and with it the risk of seeing your users migrate to your competitors. The data a user creates while using a service, and not service’s functionality, is what makes a user continue to use that service because migrating to a similar service implies losing what the data that it has created.

One other road-block to exporting data and using it outside of the place where it originated is the way it will interact with the outside systems and the possible problem of standards: how will data from one service be packaged so that it can be consumed easily by other services? Exporting the data in some RSS format and mashing it up in a Yahoo Pipes fashion could provide a way around the thorny issue of standards.
Security is another issue that comes to mind when dealing with exporting data.

For some companies binding users to their services by locking their data down doesn’t apply and Netflix is a pretty good example: Netflix can open up their users data because their service is about renting hard-to-find movies and not about hoarding user’s data in one form or another (email services, RSS readers, on-line newspapers, etc… are all about storing users data and applying some sort of functionality to it).

So we will have to wait and see how this un-folds. Frankly I do not think that data will get freed any time soon, in a world in which user loyalty exists only in history books companies will try anything it takes to bind users to their services and this includes data hoarding.
Data will probably get shared (later edit: but it will not be free in the sense that we can cherry-pick who is using it and who is not) between the different services within a large corporation not across corporations or between various companies thru partnerships, but data will not be freed without constraints. Controlling the way a service’s data is made available to other services will bind a user to that service even more because giving up on a service will mean giving up on the data stored within that service as well as giving up on the integration between that service and its partner services (within or without the original service’s corporation).

Later edit: This is one example of how our data will be shared among various entities. The new portal as envisaged by Catherine Holahan is simply a way of storing user information and disseminating it into its partner sites. Interesting to watch…