Krishwords

Facebook opened itself as a platform for application developers 3+ months back. Many in tech media were too eager to call facebook as an open platform. I was not all that happy about the “openness” of facebook then and I wrote a post in June talking about a decentralized social networking platform. In fact, I mentioned about the walled garden nature of facebook to Robert Scoble in one of his Kyte sessions. He said he is not all that worried about putting data inside the walled garden. But I am happy to learn that he has changed his opinion now and he, along with Marc Canter, Joseph Smarr and Michael Arrington are promoting a bill of rights for users of social web. This is the right step in the right direction. Once users become aware of the need for openness in the social networks, amazing things can happen. I am pretty convinced that we will be seeing more and more social networks opening up their platforms. We are going to see application developers developing apps for all these social networks. Once the social networks open up their platforms, the users are going to see a need for openness in the apps. They will want the apps to work on all the platforms. They will want to move around their data from all apps across all social networking platforms. This will end up in an open ecosystem which will ultimately benefit the consumers and there will be no single company with a monopoly hold. This is what open source had managed to achieve in the traditional software world. Unfortunately, before open source could gain foothold, Microsoft has established its monopoly in the software world. Open source faced an uphill task, first convincing consumers about the need to have open source code and then fight back against the Microsoft monopoly. All these years of hard work by the open source community has increased the awareness among consumers about the need for open standards. This, in turn, is translating into calls for open data, open communication, etc. Open source has taught us about the advantages of having an open ecosystem and how it benefits the consumers. Even though it appears like an attempt by certain industry leaders to hijack the agenda, the bill of rights for users of social web is a good step in this direction. Even though there were calls around the tech blogosphere for such an open ecosystem for quite some time now, this bill of rights will definitely help accelerate the process of increasing the awareness among the consumers about the need to take their data and their friends with them (when they move to other networks). It is better to wake up early in the game, unlike what happened in the traditional software field. It is time for consumers to tell the social media sites about the direction they want to take. I think Marc Canter, Robert Scoble and others can play a major role in creating this awareness among the users. What do you think about this bill of rights? Are you worried about the portability of your data and friends?