Last week, the fight to manage your social data kicked off in earnest as three major players in the social networking space each announced independent competing approaches to making profile and friend information data portable. MySpace Data Availability was followed by Facebook Connect and then Google Friend Connect after that. With all these competing APIs, how this will play out is anyone's guess. We've created an interactive app from Impact Games that will let you model how each of the major players will impact the data portability movement and share your opinions about what they should do.
Prior to any of the announcements last week, Chris Saad, co-founder of DataPortability.org, appeared on our podcast show ReadWriteTalk and told us that this was one of the use cases the Data Portability Project was focused on. Missing from the scrum so far is Microsoft, who Saad told us is the most data portability friendly company. What Microsoft will do is unclear at this point.
In the game below you can choose to play the role of any of 5 different players: Google, MySpace, Microsoft, the Data Portability Project, or Facebook. You can then predict what will happen, or voice your opinion about what should happen. Or both.
Example of game play: Let's say you chose to play as the Data Portability Project. You can predict that Data Portability will "criticize the vendors and encourage a vendor neutral approach." If you voice an opinion, you are guided by several "advisors" - in this case we have ReadWriteWeb, CNET and Forrester Research. The difference between predicting and voicing an opinion is that you may not necessarily agree with what you predict Data Portability or any of the different roles will do, so you can also cast your opinion about what you think they should do!
This is the second in a series of games that we'll run over the next few months on ReadWriteWeb; the first dealt with Google App Engine. In about a week, we'll be sharing the results of both what you think the different players will and should do in the future. Please share any additional thoughts on this issue in the comments below.
Disclosure: One of our writers, Sean Ammirati, is on the Impact Games advisory board.
Comments
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LOL This is too funny.
I think I know the answers but I won't spoil the game :)
Posted by: Chris Saad | May 14, 2008 2:53 PM
Hilarious. Maybe everyone can blow off steam here.
Posted by: Mary Trigiani | May 14, 2008 3:10 PM
I went to get my Masters at 55 and finished at 57 and along the way learned not only lots about Journalism but quite a bit about student culture in the new century. I set up a Facebook page because my school friends all had one and I wanted to at least try to fit in a little. Still I was surprised at the amount of time the kids spend on facebook myspace etc. I'm thinking now of setting up my own news web site about southern news and culture but for the news/op-ed/blog aspect and perhaps to make some money, not the social networking. It's all a little disturbing as well! I have an Avatar in Secondlife.com and heard a tech journalist on NPR asked if there was a danger that people would begin to think their online life and alter-ego's were more real than their real lives! She thought that as long as the controls were as hard to work as second life there was no danger of that. Thing is that it does make you wonder if Dennis Miller was right; "When the American Male can jack into the matrix and have sex with any super-model or playmate they want then it really could make the crack epidemic seem lie a Sunday afternoon in the park!"
Posted by: Emmett H. McClary | May 14, 2008 7:17 PM
Very nice.
But without OpenID I can't be bothered playing it, which is ironic given what the game is about.
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U know that?
U R!
Love,
Sock :)
Posted by: Sock Puppet | May 14, 2008 8:52 PM
I think you forgot to mention Ning as a player. They are the successors of yahoogroups and other communities. They will overtake MySpace and Facebook. But wait - Facebook will bring out FBConstructionSet.com Bild your own - like Ning.
Although I am a longtime internet expert I ignored the whole Web 2.0 thing for a long time. Last year it took off. It's mostly about SHARING stuff (like pictures, videos music, poll votes, events) and REACTING to it (via comments, tags, ratings, blog and forum posts and dating.)
Young people love to connect and meet each other online and in real life. They use walled online gardens like MySpace or Facebook. I dont' use them - I was on yahoo groups but nothing else. The dating systems have very few community aspects. You are limited with your uploads. Not everybody can see them - they have to pay. Social networks can work like that but they always have a free layer around. Social media - user generated content shared by a group. This is very attractive and hot: Twitter, Seesmic, OpenSocial, Google Friend Connect, I-not-a-Phone and more...
And if you ask me what I want? I want Interface interoperability. Date is only the first step. I want to access "my" data and play it with "this and that" interface: Twitter sequential and limited - very fast, videochat - intimate and intense, Mail - private, phone, touch...
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