Chris Saad recently posted a succinct clarification of the following questions related to some business issues around data portability:
Why would a vendor allow users to leave their service?
Why make it easy for users to take the precious data you have about them and use it on other sites?
What is the business justification for letting data walk out the door?
He’s got some helpful diagrams that illustrate his point, so I suggest reading his post on “The mythical value of data lockin“. In short, though, it’s this paragraph that seems to sum it up:
Even if you are Google, and you know every search your users do, every document they write, every chat they have – you still don’t know their facebook social graph. You don’t know their tweet stream. You don’t know the books they bought on Amazon.
I wish I could remember where I first heard this quote to attribute the source, but it works as the bumper sticker (or Twitter) version of the same sentiment:
No matter how large a website is, the internet is bigger.
Basically, sites will ultimately learn much more about their users=customers when they plug into the sharing network than they’ll be giving up. Here at matchmine, of course, we’re all about enabling sites to access user interests and tastes (under the control of the user), so we bounce into these questions (and provide the same answers) on a daily basis.
To this point, we’re walking the data portability walk ourselves. We’re not only consuming feeds from various sources, but are also a couple days away from streaming data back out, too. It’s all part of our Openness Roadmap I hope to start talking up in the coming weeks.
In the end, all of us (e.g. users, service providers, destination sites, publishers, etc.) win when we aren’t wasting time constantly reinventing wheels (or filling out yet another form). Instead, we can use that time to focus on the unique values we bring to the collective table.
Freeing Locked-up User Data
Chris Saad recently posted a succinct clarification of the following questions related to some business issues around data portability:
He’s got some helpful diagrams that illustrate his point, so I suggest reading his post on “The mythical value of data lockin“. In short, though, it’s this paragraph that seems to sum it up:
I wish I could remember where I first heard this quote to attribute the source, but it works as the bumper sticker (or Twitter) version of the same sentiment:
Basically, sites will ultimately learn much more about their users=customers when they plug into the sharing network than they’ll be giving up. Here at matchmine, of course, we’re all about enabling sites to access user interests and tastes (under the control of the user), so we bounce into these questions (and provide the same answers) on a daily basis.
To this point, we’re walking the data portability walk ourselves. We’re not only consuming feeds from various sources, but are also a couple days away from streaming data back out, too. It’s all part of our Openness Roadmap I hope to start talking up in the coming weeks.
In the end, all of us (e.g. users, service providers, destination sites, publishers, etc.) win when we aren’t wasting time constantly reinventing wheels (or filling out yet another form). Instead, we can use that time to focus on the unique values we bring to the collective table.