Udo's Techblog

In the last years, we have gotten used to web applications handling almost every aspect of our life. Each day, we create a huge amount of content: emails, instant messages, twittergrams, Facebook interactions, chats, blog posts and comments. In a very real sense, this data is our life, it's what we've been spending all this time on. Yet, most online apps don't actually let us own our content. They store it "for" us, making sure we don't get to access or use it in any way that exceeds the bare minimum functions needed to prevent migration to a competitor's platform.

Robert ran some data mining script on his Facebook account, and - very predictably - he was soon deported from Facebookland. Of course, they let him back in; everything else would have been just a disastrous PR move reminiscent of what happened to Second Life when they kicked him out. Seen any SL buzz lately? Yeah, me neither. Not that I'm complaining, it's an awful piece of software running a bleak and senseless virtual world. But none of that is the point.

The actual point is, when they banned Robert, all his content disappeared from Facebook. Think about that for a while. Our digital lives are not only threatened by bankruptcy and datacenter-scale disasters. In a setting where you're not allowed to take your own data anywhere, you're completely at the mercy of whoever gets to run those services. Somehow, we have gotten to a point where instead of owning your personal content, you just license it under whatever conditions they decide on, RIAA style.

Let's take a look into the future, where we'll spend even more time accumulating even more stuff on even fewer sites. Imagine using a social service for 20 years! Every byte of data is effort that goes into building your digital identity. Every second spent building that identity increases the mental energy needed to switch to another service and start from scratch. And then, one day, for whatever reason, all the stuff you've been doing just vanishes. It's as if you never existed.

This is a huge deal. Maybe the time isn't right for this idea to enter mainstream yet. But it will be. Someone has to start thinking about this. Sooner or later online service companies need to let us take control of our data. Otherwise, why even bother creating it? Some day, some important blogger will wake up and raise the issue and everyone will act like it's a totally novel concept. People will get ridiculous amounts VC money to solve this problem. Why doesn't Facebook preemptively solve this? Especially since it's almost possible to do today with the existing API?

Oh yes, before I forget: OpenSocial doesn't even begin to address this problem.