Brandon Werner

Way back in 2005 I wrote at length about the danger we all face putting data online. Back then, I was running The Planning Studio Inc., and we had experienced a lot of expansion and were outgrowing Salesforce.com as a Sales/Contact manager. When we became aware that extracting not just our data but also the relationships between those data was impossible, I wrote a word of warning to the blogosphere about data. I would have assumed three years later there would have been a common and demanded way to export your data. Sadly, that is not the case. Scoble became a victim of this with Facebook, and what shocked him was what occurred to me back in 2005: In Web 2.0, you don’t own your data.

It’s Not Just About Your Data, It’s About The Relationships Between Them

Although a few bring up the fact there are some ways to export your data from these various services, that missed the point badly. What Scoble and the rest lost, although they may not have been able to articulate it, was the work they put in to their data. When we import our data in to a social network application, we don’t expect to leave it in a static state. We usually import our address book and calendar, among other things, so that we can then begin creating relationships and making our data more valuable.

Think of the tagging feature in Flickr and Facebook. How often have you sat and painstakingly tagged your friends or photos for maximum social use? You may have even organized your photos in to sets that would be more viewable and easy managed, spending hours uploading and tagging. What about the APIs that allow you to visualize, browse and draw conclusions from this metadata that exists from these relationships you’ve made? You may have seen relationships you had never expected. By using social applications on the web, you have changed and made your data more useful, as simply as if you imported a CSV file in to Excel and made graphs of that data.

Does that mean that Microsoft can claim that data and the charts you’ve generated are their property? Can they take those graphs and spreadsheets away at a whim?

The same problem applies to Google and Yahoo!, among others. While many wonder if these Web 2.0 application providers are looking at our confidential data, the real worry is if they decide you can’t anymore. Although Google says publicly they have no process to look at our data we store on their servers, they most certainly have a process to remove you from it if you violate their Terms of Service, something that is at best arbitrary and a process in which you have no legal right to appeal.

The Worse Part Is, Your Hard Work Benefits The Social Network Too

The most insulting part of Facebook and others wielding that sort of power over our meta-data is that it’s through our hardwork their service is useful. Although you could call our work managing and forming relationships between our data a non-zero sum game as we also reap the benefits of the connections, our hard work makes their social websites a better and more fun place to be. If no one took the time to tag their friends in their photos, or enter tags on blog postings and pictures how interesting would these places be? It seems to me that claiming complete control over that data is a slap in the face no user of social networks should tolerate. The same holds true for other Web 2.0 apps that manage our data, including Google and Yahoo!. Deli.cio.us would Just Another Bookmark site if it wasn’t for the hard work it’s users put in to tagging and managing their bookmark data.

Although social networks can be considered non zero-sum, other Web 2.0 companies are decidedly zero-sum; we do all the work. Although there is no social component to these services, it is usually this data and the relationships between them that are more important. Many small businesses use Salesforce.com and have their business contacts linked to companies they bill for services which are in turn linked to billing and payment systems. If they don’t pay their bills for a month, or worse if they wanted to take their business elsewhere, that painstaking work linking these data pieces together, notes and all, would be lost. The same is true with financial analysis of your bank account on Mint or Notebooks on Google.

How To Fix It

Being in software architecture for large enterprise systems, the solution to this seems simple and easy. We need a way to export this data in XML or some other format that, even if it doesn’t contain the content itself (pictures and files would not be practical) the relationships between this data could be exported. It need not be wrapped up in some long drawn-out collaborate standards body in which Flickr, Facebook, Salesforce.com, MySpace and IBM (they join every standards body) would sit down and spend five years coming out with a standard.

My proposal? Facebook just does it.

In the Web 2.0 world, the prime mover is usually the standard maker for the rest of the industry. When Facebook provides it’s users with some export tool, no matter how complicated or mangled the XML would turn out to be, immediately developers would come up with tools to parse and import this data in to other applications and systems. Some would even take this data and provide analytics across various networks, something that other websites are attempting to do but at a substantial risk to your privacy as you must provide them with your login credentials to every site you belong to. Facebook may be bearable to give your login information to, but your Amazon.com profile with your One-Click Buy enabled is quite a different matter.

Other Web 2.0 environments, either through customer demand or marketing reasons, would be quick to follow. Soon, some standard schema would emerge that would be predicable or at least validated online by the services themselves. XML transformation is standard fare in the enterprise world, and there are many C# and Java developers who know how to transform some XML to another XML standard with their eyes closed. It could open up more avenues for migration and populating social networks, as well as doing personal and business analysis of your data.

Whatever the format, as long as the data inside the file is described and well formed (what XML was designed to do, describe the data it contains so any software can make sense of it) we should be able to make quick work of migrating that data to other services or applications.

Why It’s Important

Although we often don’t see it, Scoble, you and I are still “in the bubble” when it comes to technology and social media trends. We often think that because something is important or obvious to us, the rest of the world should be up in arms about it as well, when in reality they are just sitting in the living room watching TV. There are many users of Salesforce.com, Facebook and Google Notebooks that don’t think about this problem, or worse assume that there would have to be a way because it’s just logical there would be. Why would they take your friends and your photos away without giving you any recourse? Why wouldn’t you be able to export your entire client list and company list and maintain those relationships? Even just drag them in to Quickbooks Professional Edition? Wouldn’t there be some law making sure they can do that?

The answer is no. Hopefully, those who have larger voices than I did in 2005 will take this issue to a more public sphere. The danger is that this problem fades back in to the blogosphere, where Scoble gets his traffic and his hits and moves on. I don’t want to write this article again in another three years.

We should do something now, maybe using those same social networks to organize.

There are few people in our lives that we can be happy for without some jealousy. Sure whenever we shake the hand of the guy on our team promoted, slap hands with a player who bested us or applauded the top grade getter in our class back in school we always smile thinly, but deep down inside is that human tendency to speckle it with regret we are not in their place. I have to admit often times, being very competitive, I’ve felt that emotion. Only in places where we are not in direct competition or could care less about the outcome can we at once be both happy and congratulatory with honesty. I imagine someone winning a pie eating contest would qualify.

However there is a third scenario, one in which you see someone succeed where you have not and genuinely enjoy their success and can only hope for more, not only because they deserve it but because you care for them. This is called admiration, and I have it for my friend Mark Spencer, who was just picked as one of Inc’s Top 30 Entreprenuers under 30.

Sure, we were both entrepreneurs, and talked about dishonest employees, growth and other perils of business, but he has become one of the most highly visible entrepreneurs in the Open Source business model. He has been featured in Forbes, Inc.com and many other places as his business, Asterisk, has grown to become the premiere solution for telephony in both small businesses and, increasingly, large corporations. Everyone who deploys it saves massive amounts of money, gains control over their network, and wrestles their infrastructure away from the licensing whims of the AT&Ts and Avayas of the world.

His story fits the mold of a successful entrepreneur; one that never dismisses opportunity, even if it doesn’t fit with your previous business plan. In college he started a Linux support company and needed a cheap (read:free) telephony solution for his cash strapped start-up at his house. What is an open source entrepreneur to do? Why, write your own solution of course!

His software, Asterisk, is the open source solution for telephony, and his company Digium sells and manages hardware that runs his open source product. Of course, you don’t have to use their hardware, and a recent article at O’Reilly even talked about how you can use Asterisk to turn a $60 Linksys router in to a $600 telephony machine. In all of this Mark has stayed true to himself and his company, and with a character that is both disarming and geniune.

As I left being an entrepreneur in late 2005, and his work taking him to Europe and the West coast, often times in the same week, we haven’t had time to enjoy each other’s company as much as I would like. There was even a time a few months ago when he purposely took the longer flight to have a two hour lay over in Cincinnati so we could hang out. Sadly, because of work commitments, I had to ditch him. So, my Java peeps, help me make it up to him and support Open Source businesses at the same time!

Vote for him at Inc.com by going here. You may also catch his profile on Inc.com as one of their top 30 under 30 group.

As I wrote previously regarding Cincinnati economic development in Another Cincinnati Young Professional Bites It, I discussed how my friend Josh McEvoy, a University of Cincinnati graduate, had moved from Cincinnati because his work prospects here were dim. I wrote in that article that “There are barely any jobs, and even degreed young professionals like my friends Mike, Brian and Josh have recently had an impossible time of finding a job, one even thinking of waiting tables, a University of Cincinnati Information Technology graduate.”

Well, according to a Cincinnati Business Courier article today (MONK, 2005), the situation is getting worse:

“Cincinnati’s economy will grow by 3.5 percent in 2006, weaker than this year’s 3.8 percent growth rate and slower than the nation’s forecasted growth rate of 4 percent…Cincinnati’s 2005 job growth — 0.4 percent — fell far short of 1.5 percent growth predicted by the panel last year. At the same time, Cincinnati’s population growth has taken a turn for the worse, declining from 0.9 percent in the 1990s to 0.5 percent in the last five years. The region’s population growth rate is now half of the national average. Cincinnati is having a particularly tough time attracting young college graduates and foreign nationals.” (Monk 2005)

In putting the final touches on various business plans to pitch to CincyTechUSA and others regarding Third & Philadelphia, I have had to face the hard facts that in order to give my financial predictions the best chance to succeed I would absolutely have to launch the next business in a city other than Cincinnati. I have talked it over with many smart technology luminaries I’ve met in my career in San Francisco, Chicago and elsewhere and they all agree that I am too married to the idea of staying in Cincinnati. A better outcome, they suggest, would be to come out to where they are and have helped companies be successful and to stop trying to fight against the gradual decline of the mid-western cities where my resources and captial will be serverly limited.

I do have to admit that, after starting and running The Planning Studio Inc., and my experience sitting with the board of 3CDC as they carved up Over The Rhine, I do not have much hope for the economic development of this region. Sitting there in 2003 listening to Mr. Joseph Pichler, chairman of Kroger, and chairman of 3CDC’s Over The Rhine redevelopment committee, discuss how he wouldn’t let Cincinnati Art students use his new Kroger garage and lament how much his shareholders had to pay to stay in this city and how he wouldn’t pay a penny more was the most discouraging.

The romantic in me looks at the Taft Museum, the Cincinnati Symphony and the long history of art and intellectual pursuits in Cincinnati long past and hope that I could, in some small way, help rebuild that. However, the economist in me sees the racial division, the conservative suburban anti-growth bands that radiate out from the city center and the demographics of population change and know in my heart that it may never be that way.

In light of this evidence I have given myself two more years in Cincinnati to make a difference. If, after that time, I don’t see any progress in technology or biosciences in this region as a whole I will go join my friends in San Francisco and build my ideas out there instead.

References

Monk, Dan (October 24th, 2005) Local economic outlook spurs population worries. [Electronic Edition] Cincinnati Business Courier