
Open letter to Ning: help establish open standards for social networking - akkartik
http://blog.broadbandmechanics.com/2007/07/open-letter-to-marc-andressen-gina-bianchini-and-diego-doval
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zhyder
Users want control of their data, but businesses want to retain that control
as well. All businesses (web or otherwise) love to lock in their customers.
Why would Ning want to make it easy for users to leave their service?

Just like Microsoft has historically made it difficult for users of Office to
migrate to other applications. Only when the users' frustration reached a
tipping point was Microsoft forced to open its file format with OOXML.

We're not at the point yet where most users are frustrated with the lack of
portability of their networks across services like Facebook/Ning/etc. Maybe
we'll be there in a couple of years.

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euccastro
It's not so obvious. My (naive?) take on that is that if control over data is
something people want, you give it to them. You make it hard for them to leave
your service by excelling over the alternatives. That's the sane default
anyway; I understand there may be cases where it makes business sense to sell
your soul.

But note that barriers to exit are barriers to entry too. Data lock-in is the
main reason why I don't consider desktop or web apps for things such as
calendar and to-do lists. I use plain text (or YAML) files, which I maintain
with a combination of hand editing and Python scripts. This also makes it easy
to keep this data under version control, and back it up.

Since Facebook et al are not targeted for a technical audience, maybe they
don't get enough requests for data export tools.

~~~
zhyder
You're right about the barriers to entry part. But barriers to entry are low
enough for relative first movers like Facebook/Ning. When the market matures
and there are several clones of these services, Facebook/Ning will have to
rely on the lock-in to stay ahead of the competition.

There is a general trend in users' demanding openness in data, and maybe this
will have to be a core feature of any new web-service/desktop-app to succeed
in the future. But the general rule is that a business won't open the data if
it doesn't have to.

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steve
To demonstrate how absurd this concept really is, consider a similar idea:
being able to transfer all user data between any multiplayer video game. How
much of this data would really be useful in any given game? Just about none.

What the heck is the point! Without concrete examples, this argument is pretty
empty.

