Openness, where is it going to take us? (4)
Users become more dependent on them for their central data storage.
[+] An ignored project of opening user profiles
A few days before the 512 earthquake in Sichuang, China, MySpace announced its plan of MySpace Data Availability, which was to open its users’ profiles. A few days later, Facebook follow suit by launching Facebook Connect. The two companies, after the phase of opening their platforms for one year, have entered a new stage of open user profiles. Their plans were supposed to arouse extensive attention, yet they didn’t draw too much attention of the press because it was overwhelmed by earthquake news.
What is open user profile? It is about allowing users the freedom to carry their social network profiles to other websites. One simple example: you can post your photo from your MySpace album on your Yahoo Messenger. Users are able to do so if Yahoo Messenger links to MySpace platform.
Such openness breaks the barriers between websites even further. As far as small- and medium-sized websites are concerned, open platform is about social network websites inviting them in to develop applications, while open user profile is about opening user profiles for them to do applications from the outside. The former is a centralized system with a social network website at its core, and the latter concerns exchange among websites on relatively equal terms.
What has been opened includes not only user registration data (e.g. names and addresses), blogs and photos but also users’ friend lists - so that you can see if your MySpace friends log on the same website. Users can carry not only static data but also living relationships. The Internet has got to a point where the rules of the game have been constantly overwritten.
[+] Why open user profile?
Some people may think that these social network websites must have gone crazy to unconditionally open millions of their user profiles, and most important of all, the social network of users, they have accumulated for years. It is within users’ discretion if they want their profiles open and to be accessed from other websites, yet should social network websites allow their users such an option that makes their user profiles available to other websites?
From the viewpoint of users, many of them have been fed up with filling personal registration data repeatedly. Web 2.0 websites in particular would ask you to provide loads of information of interests, hobbies and things, upload photos and most annoyingly, set up friend lists and invite your friends to join. Users may think: why can’t I just use my MySpace friend list?
To streamline user registration process, small- and medium-sized Web 2.0 websites even encourage you to use the same ID you use to log on bigger websites. They, on one hand, access big social network websites’ open platforms and develop small widgets to be embedded in big websites; on the other hand, they link to these social network websites’ open profile plans so that users can carry their profiles with them.
It looks like small- and medium-sized Web 2.0 websites are getting more dependent on big social network websites. Indeed, the trend of opening up - both the platform and user profiles - has been pushing smaller Web 2.0 websites to lean on bigger social network websites. Smaller websites will find it harder to survive and get more attached to large social network websites which control the valuable and critical asset of user profiles.
[+] Demand for central storage of personal data
So, don’t social network websites worry about small- and medium-sized websites stealing the data? Firstly, Westerners have high respect to users’ privacy and it is a serious issue to access personal data without the owner’s permission. Yet, even if the small- and medium-sized websites don’t steal but just access and use the data normally, users may at the end turn to stick to them instead of the social network websites where they are from. Are these big websites not concerned?
The core of social network websites has been users’ profiles and social relationships. Look at the illustration below that shows the four layers of the concept of social network websites. We can say that it is feasible for website operators to have third parties develop applications for them as long as they have good control of the core. As a matter of fact, users prefer to store their data in one single place, so social network websites will be taking up the role of data centers.
Imagine there is one place on the Internet where it is safe for you to store all your personal data. You can user your own discretion to access this data from other websites to save the effort to repeatedly fill in the same data, and when you move house, you only need to change your contact address once at this once place and the data at other websites will be automatically updated. Such convenience is beyond understanding in the Web 1.0 era.
No small- and medium-sized websites will be able to steal user profiles from big social network websites, and the significance of social network websites will not be reduced whatsoever. In fact, as social network websites are opening their user profiles to more other websites, their users become more dependent on them for their central data storage. The more you open, the better chance you have in the competition - this is the true meaning of online openness.
At the same time, what problems there will be when social network websites are becoming a personal data platform?
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