
Data Protectionism Begins In Earnest - ssclafani
http://techcrunch.com/2010/11/05/data-protectionism-begins-in-earnest/
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jhrobert
I am cross posting a comment here that I posted on TC, this is an experiment
to help me compare the reactions, sorry for the potential inconvenience.

2 things:

A) Don't under estimate the power of software. It is obvious that I have full
access right to my "friends" list, including data that my friends share with
me. It is only a matter of time/need until easy tools to export this will be
in the hands of users, power users firsts, casual users next

B) Most users on facebook were rather computer illiterate at first ; we're
talking about a population that basically is "discovering" the power of
computers. They learn. They will leverage this knowledge to escape whatever
walled garden emprison them, if only to do the cool thing that cool guys do.

C) A flat list of friends is a very primitive way to describe social
relationships, mixing strong ties with weak ties to the extreme ; this does
not scale, this does not reflect the true and essential complexity of
relationships. Focus will shift to more fine grained (and fluid) ways to
describe relationships.

D) The real issue is the single login one I think. I tend to believe that it
makes sense that people will use their most "public" profile to login. That
makes Facebook a strong contenter. But for quite some times, there will be
services requiring an email address to login. Facebook (and Twitter) should
better provide an email address soon, or else people will eventually become
fluent enough to use a gmail one...

Facebook is one big step in the evolution of Internet, but it is just a step.

OK, not 2 things... that's serendipity I guess ;)

