Perspective

Not long ago, you could hardly express yourself on the Web. You lacked the tools to do that. Blogging came along and changed all that. Then you wanted to share your newly discovered web life with your friends. Social networking came along and helped you do that. Once social networking became the norm, you wanted to be able to take advantage of the data that lied in the very social links that formed on the Web. Call it social intelligence, crowd sourcing, whatever. Some social networks opened up and let you build and use applications that used the social connections on top of which they were built to bring you more value. Poking yourself isn’t that much fun, after all.

It’s simply the way we do things in our daily live, only now it’s on the web. We talk to the people around us, now we ca express ourself just as easily on the Web. We know who our friends are and we usually meed friends of friends in real life. We can do the same on the Web. And we go shopping, we plan trips, we go to concerts, we read books. We do all of this socially, with input from our friends in our real life. And now we do the same on the Web.

But what if we could go further? What if we could use the Web in new exciting ways so that we can do things that it’s difficult for us to do in real life? Think about the next possibilities for a moment…

You have a favorite restaurant where you go to all the time. They know what you like and how you like it. But you go on vacation to some distant place. What if the restaurant of the hotel you’re staying at could know what the restaurant back home knows about you? Would they be able to serve you better? Would you have a more pleasant experience there? Probably. Or imagine that you like to order in. You have 2 or 3 dishes you’d like for dinner. But now that you’re on vacation, you can’t find the 3 dishes at a single restaurant. You find them at 3 different ones. What if there could be a delivery service that knew what dishes you liked, and could get them for you, even while you were on vacation?

What’s the next step

These are just simple examples that show one thing: We have the platform to create and deliver new, exciting services, but we lack the data about the users most of the time. That data exists somewhere in most of the cases. The problem is that it’s locked in.

So the next step in social networking, I argue, is letting go of the data. Facebook knows who my friends are (on Facebook) and what I’m doing there. LiveMocha knows who my friends are (on LiveMocha), and what I’m learning there. It would really be useful if these two social networks could communicate. And I’m not just talking about having all my friends in one place, or a single friend social stream, or a single friend request inbox. These are useful features too.

Just to make things clear, I’m not talking about Data Portability here. Data portability is just the first layer. The second layer are the applications that will be created, and the third layer are the social implications of those applications. I know people are working on data portability for quite some time, and we’ll get there soon. What I’m talking about is how we’ll be using that data, once it’s free. Portability is just the beginning of it all.

What I’m talking about is LiveMocha finding out that I’m planning a trip to Iceland this summer. I’m going with some friends on Facebook. Now LiveMocha could offer me an Icelandic 101 language course. It could recommend some people that are Iceland natives. Not just to teach me the language, but to give me some information I might need, or even to hook up while I’m there. At present this is a scenario that simply can’t happen.

Why we should do it

First of all, I believe that the data is ours. Maybe not all of it, but who my friends are, how I’m connected to them and what I’m talking to them about is mine. I should be able to do whatever I want with it.

Secondly, this is probably the most effective way to get new, great services that haven’t been possible before. It may even be the only way. Just look at Facebook Apps. There are thousands of them out there. Facebook alone would have had a really tough time creating all of them. And there are thousands more to come. Only by letting the community contribute can we get new applications that we haven’t seen before.

Thirdly, this can spark competition. A lot. It’s really hard to start a new social application that requires a lot of people to sign up. If they are already on a social network, half the problem is solved. But just think what we could do if we could take the social graphs from several social networks, combine them with some other open services (maps, search, photos, calendars, etc.) and get really cool new services? Without an open infrastructure, it’s really hard for a startup to handle all of these problems. Using networks and platforms that already exist and that are open could help a lot of new startups take off.

Fourthly, technology is getting to a point where it’s becoming transparent. We surf the web to get information, meet people and discuss things. Why should I care if some interesting people are on Facebook and if some great discussion is taking place on Yahoo! Groups? I just want to meet the people and take part in the conversation. The “location” and the technology behind it all should be of no interest to me. Opening the data could make these technologies transparent to us.

These are only a few of the reasons that support opening up the data. I’m sure you can find many others.

What do you think the challenges might be in doing this? And what cool services would you like to see, that aren’t available yet because of this problem?