In Defence Of Facebook

It feels like 1999 for Facebook. Microsoft did not split, but all the DC harassing was a hint it was no longer on the cutting edges of innovation. Facebook feels like on a standstill. It has taken quite a beating. There is a backlash.

Facebook is not the next Facebook, and Google is not the next Google, although some of Google's so-called moonshot projects are quite impressive, and in the pipeline.

Today I make free video calls to my parents in Nepal, thanks to Facebook Messenger, although it is true there are others like it. When I showed up for college in Kentucky, and the Internet was the new kid on the block, I had to pay something like two dollars per minute to call my parents. The college phone service was a monopoly. VOIP was unheard of. So when a few years later I came across 20 cents per minute deals, it felt like rocket science to me. Also, at that work study college, you were legitimately paid way below minimum wage. Which meant a week's wages could easily be spent on one conversation. :)

In my home village in Nepal, one of my failed initiatives was to launch a library. It did not fail. We did collect a few books. I donated most of it. But it did not take off as envisioned. Well, in that village today you can get a phone with a data plan. And, boom, there is a library called Google.

The tech giants are subject to public criticism, sure, why not. But let's maintain perspective.

The Big Four -- Apple, Amazon, Google, Facebook --- have collected a lot of data on each of us. True. But what would be the best next step? I think data portability. The data around each person is a personal oil well. It will pay for Universal Basic Income. 

FACEBOOK BOARD DEFENDS HOW ZUCKERBERG, SANDBERG HANDLED CRISIS

John Battelle Has Hit Oil

John Batelle hit oil. Data is the new oil. And every individual is sitting on their own personal oil well. Only right now The Big Four have it. That should shift to individuals. But oil is physical. Data is not. Data portability will cause the ownership shift without harming The Big Four. This oil well is big enough that it could fund the much touted Universal Basic Income.

Don’t Break Up The Tech Oligarchs. Force Them To Share Instead.

The idea is simply this: Require all companies who’ve reached a certain scale to build machine-readable data portability into their platforms. ....... that one rule, that one requirement: That every data service at scale had to stand up an API that allowed consumers to access their co-created data, download a copy of it (which I am calling a token), and make that copy available to any service they deemed worthy? ...... the example of a token that has all your Amazon purchases, which you then give to Walmart so it can do a historical price comparison and tell you how much money you would save if you shopped at its online service. ..... I mean, don’t we at least co-own the information about what we bought at Amazon? ...... Why can’t an ecosystem of agents, startups, and data brokers emerge, a new industry of information processing not seen since the rise of search optimization in the early aughts, leveraging and arbitraging consumer information to create entirely new kinds of businesses driven by insights currently buried in today’s data monopolies? ...... It’s be a lot like the Internet was once imagined to be. ...... it could dwarf our current Internet in terms of overall value created ..... tens of thousands of new companies would form, all of them feeding off the newly liberated oxygen of high quality, structured, machine readable data.

Data Could Drive a Small Business Renaissance. But First, We Have to Free It.

The intents, desires, and needs of tens of millions of consumers, who relentlessly poured their queries into Google’s placid and unblinking search box. ..... Adwords was a freaking revolution, but it ain’t nothing compared to what will happen if we unleash data tokens on the world. ...... what happens when local entrepreneurs have access to the information currently silo’d across thousands of walled garden services like Uber, LoopNet, Resy, and of course Facebook and Google ...... dry cleaners, hardware stores, bike shops — and this newly liberated class of information enables an explosion of efficiency, investment, and, well, flourishing in what has become, over the past four decades, a stagnant SMB environment. ..... this new competitive force will drive everyone to play at a higher level, focusing not on moats built on data silos, but instead on what really matters: A highly satisfied customer. That’s certainly Michelle’s goal, and the goal of every successful local business. Why shouldn’t it also be the goal of the data giants?