JonMountjoy.com

Scarcity power over your social connections is the lynchpin of many social networking sites. If only LinkedIn has the power to connect you to a business colleague, because that’s where your contacts, your social graph, resides - well that’s going to do LinkedIn a lot of good. If on the other hand you open your social graph, free it from the grip of LinkedIn (or Plaxo, or Facebook, or …), where does that leave the likes of LinkedIn? Will they be far less competitive without your social graph? Undoubtedly. Will Facebook? Perhaps not - Facebook has a platform built around the graph, which provide an abundance of additional functionality.

A while back I wanted a website where I can share and record books that I’m reading. After a few searches, I ended up on goodreads, which has a lot of nice functionality. Cool, I thought. Then I started experimenting with Facebook, and goodreads didn’t have any Facebook integration then so I started using “Visual Bookshelf” on Facebook. Great, now I could share the books I read with friends in my Facebook social network. And it works too. But in my excitement I forgot to check on something: can I export my data from Visual Bookshelf? The answer appears to be a resounding no.

This cuts to the heart of open data. This is what makes Visual Bookshelf iniquitous (I’m reading Wodehouse) - it is utterly unacceptable for a site not to provide export functionality of my data. Flickr does it, which is why I trust it with my photos. Okay, it doesn’t provide an export button, but searching for export in the help makes it clear how easy it is. Visual Bookshelf does not.What’s linking these two thoughts? I recently read this great article on wired, Slap in the Facebook: It’s Time for Social Networks to Open Up, damning the Facebooks and MySpaces for holding onto our data. Artur Bergman then pointed out the manifesto, Thoughts on the Social Graph, which makes a great point at explaining how these social networks, from Facebook to LinkedIn, are holding on to my social graph, and what you can do about it.

I think the problem area should be expanded a little, especially when social networks become platforms as Facebook has done. I want Facebook to liberate my social graph, but I also want the applications that I use on Facebook to liberate my data too. Trawling around goodreads, I found that they now have an API. So I’m in the process of dumping Visual Bookshelf and returning to goodreads, in the hope that they’ll make it dead simple for me to export my reviews in future, and that they fix their abysmal Facebook integration.But a question remains: What makes people so eager to use an application without thinking about the consequences of what it means to their data? Why do millions of people continue to store their book reviews in goodreads and visual bookshelf and Amazon?

• Do they expect these companies to be around in a decade or two? In other words, do they expect permanence?
• Do they expect that these companies will act in good faith and provide an export feature in future?
• Are they not interested in the data? Perhaps they just want to express themselves now - if it’s temporary well that’s okay.

It’s quite okay to be in the temporary camp. My throwaway data may be your bread and butter; that’s okay.For those in the permanence camp and good faith camps - we need to do a lot more to ensure our data survives the company hosting it. Is it really too much to ask that our contributions to Amazon and LinkedIn and Facebook remain ours? Even if I publish my liberated book reviews on my own site, that’s not going to undermine the true value of Amazon (selling the book) or goodreads (aggregating my book shelves).I’m still willing to make use of these services, just let me have my data.

I have to thank Anne for writing Do You Have to Define a Niche for Your Blog? Anne has put into words the problem I’ve had with this blog, and its previous incarnations. I had always subscribed to the “define your niche and then stick with” paradigm, and it was a mistake.The problem is that I’ve had success with this paradigm before - it does have its place. For a while I ran a popular technology blog on the awesome Spring Framework. And having focus on such a blog is a good thing. The problem was how to translate that to my own blog, and the essence of where I went wrong was thinking of myself as a product. I didn’t do that explicitly, but I suspect that was behind all my other faulty reasoning. Anne puts it nicely: “It’s okay to be a person online.”I’ve been thinking about this same issue as I start to explore social networks like Facebook. Do I expose “me” on Facebook, or a subset of “me”. I really dislike the “subset” aspect - it’s dishonest - so I’ve taken to going the whole hog in my little experiment. But there’s this nagging doubt because of what folk deem Facebook is “for.” Well, tough.So thank you Anne - you’ve given new impetus to my reboot.