Forcing us to be on facebook to use spotify is bullshit.
Google achieve the same but they do it by being better than their competition. Facebook achieve it by being better at one stage and achieving a critical mass. It was a land grab and they now have gathered up, for free, a very valuable commodity and can do pretty much what they want with it.
The other week David Mitchell suggested nationalising it.
Obviously that can't really work, though it would be nice.
What I want is for the WC3 to develop the tools to break up Facebook's unfair advantage in human capital and open them up to competition.
Your details and their ability to advertise to you is the price of the service. You should be able to take those details anywhere you like and still have access. So we need to develop technology such that, for instance, your facebook profile can interact easily with somebody else's google+ profile or bebo profile. These guys compete to offer a service in terms of the organisation of your details and interactions with friends. essentially they can all have different front ends but the data is essentially the same.
This is what the web and the WC3 has always been about. Setting data standards so that different networks can understand each other easily.
So if the WC3 sets standards for saving your, personal details AND for interactions with Flickr, facebook and the rest... It should be possible for you to have one profile which you can take and leave anywhere you like. If you prefer to use google+ but your friends won't move from facebook it should be possible for you to interact with their facebook profile from your google+ profile.
If you create an event on google+ it is stored there but then you can invite friends who are storing their profile on facebook.
Are you with me? This should not be beyond the whit of the sexy web-geeks. Though facebook might not be willing to sign up I would bet others would. AND if their free'er service proved to be better it would present a much more attractive draw to people than google+ is currently. I would even expect google to put money behind organising the community in the way some do for Linux fixes.
The internet wants and needs to be free. Don't let the robber barrons win.
Right I'm off to post this on Facebook.
Word!
ReplyDeleteIn principle I agree with what you're saying, however I still mistrust Google much more than Facebook. It's like Apple and Microsoft - at least everyone KNOWS that Microsoft/Facebook is evil, and doesn't trust them 100%. Google is working their way to building up our trust, and then, before we can switch to something else, BANG, they'll come up with an evil plan to take over the world.
ReplyDeleteRight, I'm off to use Gmail and Blogspot.