// The Song Remains The Same

Data Availability, Portability, Interopability — however you’d like to term it, always reminds me of an old children’s story, “Stone Soup”.

From Wikipedia:

According to the story, some travelers come to a village, carrying nothing more than an empty pot. Upon their arrival, the villagers are unwilling to share any of their food stores with the hungry travelers. The travelers fill the pot with water, drop a large stone in it, and place it over a fire in the village square. One of the villagers becomes curious and asks what they are doing. The travelers answer that they are making “stone soup”, which tastes wonderful, although it still needs a little bit of garnish to improve the flavor, which they are missing. The villager doesn’t mind parting with just a little bit to help them out, so it gets added to the soup. Another villager walks by, inquiring about the pot, and the travelers again mention their stone soup which hasn’t reached its full potential yet. The villager hands them a little bit of seasoning to help them out. More and more villagers walk by, each adding another ingredient. Finally, a delicious and nourishing pot of soup is enjoyed by all.

Really, in a lot of ways, startups are just the hungry travelers. Alone, we have a long road to haul to compete with the high traffic sites. We need traffic to survive, and the evolution of the web is highly heterogeneous in nature. In other words, traffic is our food, and right now a very attractive option for all of us is to share data and promote one another’s sites so that we become more than the sum of our parts.

Not everyone has always felt that sharing data was a good idea, especially networks of yesteryear. AOL, facebook, Microsoft — the list goes on and on. Allowing data out of the walled gardens was something that was not to be considered. They want data to go into their networks, but not come out.

Data usage is shifting on the internet. First we got The Net, then we get The Web, and now we are hurdling towards The Graph. The Graph is the layer of data that sits on top of the web interconnected via links. There are already many forms of this type of data emerging such as RDF and microformats. As data becomes even more linked and applications begin to take advantage of this, traffic patterns will shift from running through portals such as yahoo.com towards the user going to a specific application and their data following them there. Some people call this The Cloud. Right now these big portals, such as yahoo, make a lot of money off of how their user base flows through their front gates on a daily basis. However, if that user base begins to drift off into the unknown regions of the internet to use the latest and greatest web tools, and those users’ data follows them to those tools and apps, then these big sites, these closed off “Silos”, will have an issue with how their current business model works.

I dont want to make any “media changes every 100 years”-level statements here, but I can definitely feel a shift towards data moving somewhat freely between applications and sites. If you really own your data, you should be able to use it in other web apps.

Let’s think about a few things for a minute;

• Why would any sane commercial company allow their data to be pulled into another web site? Now think about how that is phrased for a moment, and then replace “web site” with “application”. We’ll come back to that in a minute.
• Why would they allow that? That’s a trick question, really — the data does not belong to them, because after a certain point of “market equilibrium” users simply will not allow a “silo” to tell them how to use their data. Oh, you dont think so? Let’s go back a few years.
• What if, back in 1996, you had a desktop application like Quicken, and you could never get your data out of that application for backup, or transfer, or in any type of format; What would you do? I’m going to guess that you might find another application to manage your finances, but that might not hold for everyone. However, at this point, for desktop applications that simply would not be tollerated.
• So let’s ask another question: Does Intuit “own” your Quicken data? If they told you that you could not export your data, and it was locked into one machine, at this point what would your reaction be? Over time, the currently held notion that a “silo” can control your data will melt away due to market forces. Why, you ask?

The Silo will die if it does not evolve and integrate itself within the greater context of The Graph.

Just this week both facebook and myspace, two major players in the social network game, announced plans by which data would be able to move around to other applications outside their networks (to varying degrees). Google is striking with its own product that promotes data interoperability with third party sites. Why the flurry of action all of the sudden? Techcrunch puts it like this:

The reason these companies are are rushing to get products out the door is because whoever is a player in this space is likely to control user data over the long run. If users don’t have to put profile and friend information into multiple sites, they will gravitate towards one site that they identify with, and then allow other sites to access that data.

Adaptation is the only way to live. Although data is going to move around it won’t be the end of the world — for the ones that learn to play ball quickly enough. The players who evolve as the market sees fit will thrive; the old silos that don’t evolve will have trouble competing.