http://www.mediainfluencer.net/2008/02/power-to-the-persons-redux/
http://www.mediainfluencer.net/2008/02/social-cloud-and-the-blue-pill/

Btw, I am a keen supporter of dataportability.org… taking the toys (data) away from web apps and platform owners should bring some interesting developments. :)

I sincerely hope that pay-for-meter becomes more popular in the future. The penny-gap is largely a cultural phenomenon where people think the internet should be both free as in speech and free as in beer, combined with the lack of a really simple and ubiquitous micro-payment provider.

But until then, a majority of startups will depend on the very very unoriginal “lets get popular and stick ads in there!” business model, upon which raw data accessibility is not easily monetizeable. I don’t think Amazon S3 is a good analogy: it’s customer base are the content/application providers, who are business and don’t really exhibit a penny gap like consumers do.

Given the current situation communal data property rights, IMHO, can only be established meaningfully when strong individual data property rights are first established. In the current situation any attempt at communal property rights will, again just my viewpoint, dominated by web site vendor domination of data property.
How do we talk about “our data property” when we don’t even have a concept of data as property?

Nitin

How does this model address the “ours” data? Our mutual rep/feedback status - and the data in my social graph?

You’re absolutely spot on about users giving away rights. I personally use coercive web services as little as possible - I try to use for fee web services that don’t try to take over my data. The big trap of web 2.0 has been the so called “free” services that take all your data property rights in return for their non-fee-but-not-really-free services. If users want only free services then they have to give up something and that has been data rights. But it won’t take a revolution - all it will take is the next generation of web apps whose main differentiation is YOYODA - You Own Your Onw Data Always. Yoyoday apps will of necessity be for-fee apps and as I mentioned earlier the foundation for Yoyoda apps is Amazon Web Services and similar for fee “data infrastructure” layer services in the Internet Operating System.
In future rather than creating your data “in the web app” you would create it on your desktop in raw form ( text, image, ausio, video ) then save it to say S3. Then in your web app you would merely add a URI pointing to your asset on S3.

Note that when you save all your data like this you are only moving pointers around and you never, never need to move your data around because your data is never in the app in the first place.

Also since you save your data in the cloud and not in the app, a single definitive copy of your data is in S3 and you don’t have to copy in and out, you can version it and send notifications to listeners etc.

Aside from the EULA’s which are coercive, the concept of saving data “in the app” is broken. increasingly web service providers are using S3 and S3 like services to save your data and mine while they still own our data.

A simple way to get out of this situation is to go save it on S3 ourselves so we continue to own our data and then just put a URI in teh app. Voila! We just routed around the damage.

Actually one implication of this article is that lack of Data Portability is actually a symptom and the disease is lack of Data Property Rights. So I beg to differ. If you consider the two to be equal you are confusing the effects (lack of Data Portability) with the cause (lack of Data Property Rights).

Each data right does not necessarily have to be monetized separately, it is possible for revenue from one to subsidize the other. Also note that Amazon charges a per request and per Gig data transfer charge so that’s a straightforward way to monetize accessibility.

Note that Amazon Web Services is one strong candidate for being the “data infrastructure layer” of the Internet Operating System and they are doing it in a way that by default respects all data property rights.

So look for how this will be disruptive to the big players while generating revenue for Amazon which is independent of ad revenue dependent booms and busts.

The only way out as far as I can guess is to charge a fee-for-access, but given the penny gap, your data accessibility is criteria would be quite difficult to meet, save a handful of application where the value of data accessibility is clear and marketable.