On data portability
Posted on May 27th, 2008 by Jackie Danicki
For various reasons, I am quite interested right now in data portability and fully user-driven (not user-centric) data management. (Read all of Adriana’s posts on the topic - she is, as ever, talking so much more sense than anyone out there.) So this line from Dave Winer jumped out at me:
[T]oday I don’t think an API is enough. As we’ve seen with Twitter, when the service goes down, there is no API and there is 100 percent lock-in. We need more. The most vital data must be stored off-site, so it doesn’t go away when the service goes down.
Filed under: Life
Oh yeah. Twitter reminds me a lot of the olden days of chat rooms, now including that horrible feeling when suddenly nothing is there. Cancelled conversations can’t be replaced, it’s a creative thing. What’s behind the lock-in phenomenon anyway, paranoid brand-control, underestimating people, technical limitations? (Don’t answer that if it needs a hundred paragraphs and you’re on 12 planes at the time, obviously :-))
Alice,
Lock-in is basically about creating friction so that customers won’t easily leave you to go elsewhere, and so that anything that people want to do with their data is on your terms.
Say (like Dave Winer) you’ve written a bunch of movie ratings on Yahoo. Say Yahoo hypothetically offered a movie rental service which takes your ratings and profiles them to create a list of advised movies (and also reminds you of movies you’ve seen). Maybe Netflix offers the same service, but because they can’t read your data from Yahoo, you have to type it all in. That makes it less likely that you’ll go elsewhere.