Blank (Media) Slate

Nitin Borwankar put forth a compelling commentary as it relates to Data Portability vs. a deeper Terms of Service (TOS) discussion on behalf of the consumer:

The real problem – The Elephant In the Room – is whether web app vendors “play fair” with my data when it is IN the web app, not whether they “allow” me to take my data and go play elsewhere. There are two major choices for a web app user here, just as for a dissenter in a social structure – “voice” and “exit”. Data Portability focuses only on “exit” and is not just incomplete but massively disempowering to the user of the web app.

He then called out four points he sees as the consumer’s “voice” within a given service:

• Data Accessability (DA)
• Data Visibility (DV)
• Data Removal (DR)
• Data Ownership (DO)

You’ll probably want to read through his entire post for the full meat (there’s much there), but he sums up with:

In summary, incorporating Data Property Rights into the current conversation completes the picture by adding the web app user’s “voice”. This empowers web apps users and it also seeds new viable business models. For-fee services providing strong user rights without a coercive advertising model will emerge and form a new “data infrastructure” layer of the Internet Operating System – it’s a need that is crying out to be fulfilled. If the dominant players do not want to satisfy this need then market forces amplified by user emotion will disrupt them and we will see once again how the net routes around damage – in this case badly damaged Data Property Rights.

I agree with much of what Nitin is saying here. I see the DataPortability Project story as being a strong part of this picture he’s painting. I understand there are a lot of nuances here between “Data Portability” and his four points, and time will tell what consumers latch onto and how the ball is moved forward.

I believe the world’s moving quickly to a point where content units will be quantized to the degree where they will easily flow between distribution/syndication channels. Perhaps it’ll be driven by something like what people are calling the Semantic Web, basically allowing content units to be self-describing so they can be assembled by consumers and their agents (eg. sites, applications, feeds, etc.).

The value in the relationship with a customer, then, is centered around servicing them. Regardless of the content they’re seeking, companies will want to develop a solid relationship with their consumers. In this model, the long term value to the consumer could be a function of (DA,DV,DR,DO,DP). The trick will be in determining the weighted relationships between each parameter (per each consumer/provider pair).

FWIW - My bet is that there won’t be a one-size-fits-all equation, but rather a range of acceptable values based on context.