Facebook’s new Messaging service provides a neat summary of where we’ve got to so far on the online journey…
In one way, Facebook Messaging is a good step forward. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg explained the thinking behind it like this:
“Email filters of the past ten or fifteen years have gotten very good at filtering out the real junk, so you don’t get a lot of Viagra email anymore, but you do get a lot of random emails from the services you subscribe to…different things that you connect to that you might not be that interested in hearing from. And one thing that email can’t do is differentiate between two real people who are both real people sending you legitimate emails, but it can’t differentiate between which one you like more.”
Where people explicitly want to share things with other people, and that ends up being a better way to filter things that you can get through an algorithm.” (http://bit.ly/bulgHS )
That’s also the thinking behind Mydex. If you empower people to specify what they want “to input their own information about who they are and what they want” it turns out to be far richer, better and more efficient for everybody than trying to tell people what they want, guess what they want, or even model what you think they might want using clever algorithms that usually boil down to little more than souped-up guesswork.
That’s the plus side.
As ever with Facebook however, the downside is that it’s still part of a personal data landgrab. When you specify what you want you are volunteering important, valuable information and, under the Facebook approach, every time you do this, the data becomes theirs, not yours.
In the Facebook context, the provision of cool new services like this becomes just another way to lock you into a proprietary system under its control, to ultimately benefit Facebook, not the individual.
Google highlighted this issue neatly in its current spat with Facebook about importing friends contact lists. Its warning message reads:
Hold on a second. Are you super sure you want to import your contact information for your friends into a service that won’t let you get it out?
Here’s the not-so-fine print. You have been directed to this page from a site that doesn’t allow you to re-export your data to other services, essentially locking up your contact data about your friends. So once you import your data there, you won’t be able to get it out. We think this is an important thing for you to know before you import your data there. (http://bit.ly/cTG5Zi )
The whole point of Mydex, of course, is the principle that personal data is the person’s, not anyone else’s. To underline that point, at our exec meeting yesterday we agreed that anyone wishing to become a shareholder in Mydex will have to sign a shareholder agreement committing them to the fact that Mydex will never attempt to “lock in” its customers or their data. It’s theirs to take wherever they want to.
Alan Mitchell
