Comments on: Set The Data Free, And Value Will Follow

By: Jan Simmonds

Jan Simmonds — Fri, 29 Apr 2011 22:35:20 +0000

Always enjoy your journalistic, pragmatic and measured approach to subjects others report with too much emotion and not enough reality.

Facebook's social graph is to me, like ice cream in a sieve. The outside air currently cooled by public naivety, but threatening a rapid temperature rise every time Facebook opens the door on the heat of its repeated transgressions and whilst trying to find ways of bullying its way out of the the Catch-22 situation it is in. (If you've ever seen the original Italian Job, I have visions of a bus on a precipice and a pile of gold too.)

All it needs is a business to arrive, founded on the premise of ownership of your own digital identity, a trusted mechanism for sharing proportionately in the value of the content you create and the same level of trust you'd expect from a bank or doctor and then the ice cream melts and the social graph is no longer stuck in one place. Rather people would be in charge of their own digital homes and encouraged to dress them with the brands they like and in such a way so as they are well motivated to provide the holy grail for marketeers.

Facebook can't retrospectively do this because the latent resentment for their abuses of trust runs deep and the fickle public may not have been shown the warm light, but when they do, they will have long memories.

I wrote about it better here - http://blog.famebook.com/famebook/2011/03/social-media-is-not-social-yet.html and I hope you'll forgive the link!

By: daisy

daisy — Fri, 29 Apr 2011 18:24:51 +0000

I can’t wait to pay my mortgage with information tokens.

By: DNN

DNN — Thu, 28 Apr 2011 19:55:26 +0000

The beauty of the internet is that once we get the useful data and share it globally with others, the universe comes back and opens more doors for us on the world wide web by way of giving us more business. When it comes to sharing information online, all it is basically is recycling knowledge from one person to the next =)

By: Ed

Ed — Thu, 28 Apr 2011 18:09:22 +0000

Agreed John, sharing is better than hoarding. At pachube, we're working with real-time data a la the Internet of Things. We're betting that open data is the key to commercial innovation, specifically because of the technical difficulty in managing torrents of time-series datapoints. If everything is buttoned up, this thing will never get off the ground. The data has to be portable and follow the user's pocketbook, and that's what we're trying to facilitate. We believe that if we build on this model from the beginning, we can not only differentiate, but facilitate something really powerful.

Check here:
http://blog.pachube.com/2011/04/open-data-streamroller.html