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Category: user data

The Google Cloud is Dead, Now Where’s My Data? Toward Data Liquidity…

Published February 10, 2008 by cgerrish

dollars

We tend to think that certain things will be around forever. Brands we love, bull markets and governments all act as though they will continue indefinitely. Dominance intends that its dominance persist, but everything comes to an end. If all your personal data lived in Google’s cloud, what happens when Google goes out of business? How are you going to get your data out? Is cloud-based computing being built with the assumption that all of the players will exist forever? The more locked in your data is to proprietary formats, the less liquid it is.

Money, cash in particular, has become data; and the speed with which it can move and transform defines its liquidity. How liquid is our personal data? Those financial institutions that custody our financial assets cooperate so that we can move our holdings from one institution to another. How do the web institutions that custody our personal data measure up?

Marc Canter has talked about having a “DeBabelizer” for personal data. That’s a tool we used in the old days to translate graphic file formats to work with our local platform and toolset. It was essential in the days before consolidation and cross-platform graphic software. The prospect of having to unscramble my personal data is not comforting. The only reason to have a DeBabelizer is that one is surrounded by Babel.

Movements like data portability are largely a matter of metaphors and memes. The technology has to be very simple to actually work. The extent to which the meme is highly contagious within the general user population is the extent of the movement’s success. My contribution to the conversation is to measure the liquidity of personal data. For instance, I can imagine trading liquidity for higher value. But I’d like to know when I’m entering into that contract.

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Scoble Erased: If only there were some kind of data Bank

Published January 5, 2008 by cgerrish

Robert Scoble complains about being erased. Or rather the data and content that he put on Facebook ceased to exist to the extend that he no longer had access to or control over it. We can talk all we want about how our attention data, social graph, personal data and created content is ours and we should have absolute and continuous access to it; in addition, we should be able to move it and leverage it in other contexts. This ignores the economics of the capture and storing of that data. The cost is not zero. If it were we could do it for ourselves.

And that I suppose is the point. We trade that data for a service, value traded for value. If Scoble doesn’t want to be erased, why not record a copy of everything he puts into a commercial website? He could keep it on a local hard drive or a network storage service. Or perhaps in some kind of gesture bank, where he could trade its value for goods and services.

Scoble needs to remember that it’s not really his, unless he invests in making it his.

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Erasure or Silence: Steve Gillmor and Rose Mary Woods

Published December 20, 2007 by cgerrish

Rose Mary Woods 

Coincidence? Rose Mary Woods erases 18 1/2 minutes of the Nixon tapes, Steve Gillmor claims that the 7 minutes of quiet at the beginning of a Gang de Gillmor podcast is meaningful silence. Will we ever know for sure if the silence was simply silence– or was erased on purpose.

 Steve Gillmor

Some think that Gillmor concisely explained attention and gestures during the missing minutes. Others believe that Gillmor has never recovered from his youthful dalliance with Nixon’s personal secretary Rose Mary Woods. While Gillmor was never able to reconcile himself to Woods’s politics, the heart wants what it wants. Since that time, erasure and silence have had a strange hold over Gillmor.You can judge for yourself by finding the Gang podcast on Facebook. Gillmor’s absence from the rest of the Internet is simply another example of his obsession with not speaking, not linking and recording silence (erasure). 

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Facebook: Love-based Valuation & Poisoning the Well

Published December 1, 2007 by cgerrish

It’s Love (heart)

The temptation of total surveillance is always there, for government and for business. Marketers want the ability to know everything about everyone’s behavior, tastes and buying patterns to target offers and advertising at us. The more they know, the better they can target. Although most businesses need to do more than preach to the choir, they need new converts.

Facebook’s Beacon takes users for granted. Users love Facebook and they love what they can build within the Facebook platform. Love is a strong emotion, and when it is betrayed it can behave in unpredictable ways. Social networks are fragile and Facebook took a big risk with Beacon. More and more, Beacon is being viewed as a betrayal of Facebook’s users. When you think about the valuation of a company like Facebook, the real value is in the love and respect of the users. The technology is a wasting asset that has nominal value. Facebook risked everything with Beacon. The steps they take to recover at this point will determine the future value of the company.

The idea of “love” as a factor in value and valuations came to me from two directions. I heard former quarterback Steve Young talk about what made Bill Walsh’s 49er Superbowl teams so special. Young cited a number of factors, but added that the feeling of love and respect among team members as a key ingredient. It was a conscious coaching strategy that Walsh used to build a winning team. The other source is a talk given by Clay Shirky on software applications, Perl and community-based developer support. His idea is that a strong community can be a more dependable resource for application support than a commercial firm in the business of selling support services. This is certainly true of the Perl, Python, PHP and Ruby communities. It’s also true of applications like WordPress, Joomla and Drupal, and libraries like Prototype and Jquery.

You’ll often hear people joke about the special ingredient in some recipe being ‘love.’ We laugh, because we think of love as being insubstantial, in some ways without physical presence or value. But if we take it for granted, the joke’s on us.

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