Tuesday, February 12, 2008

Information sink vs information source

How Sticky Is Membership on Facebook? Just Try Breaking Free - New York Times

Another example of how most applications act like information sinks. It's easy to enter your information (data about you), but once you do, you lose control. The Facebook application (like almost any other online application) is an information sink.
Image via http://images.macworld.com
To me it seems the only approach to preserve control over your data is to leave those applications alone. That's why I'm not on Myspace, Facebook or others (Linkedin being the exception, for some reason).

Ideally, I would like to have the ability to create an information source, totally under my control, in which I design and edit my profile. A generic protocol for addressing and disclosure would then allow other applications and people to use this information source for many different applications (which would then basically become views on my data, and that of others in the aggregate).

What do you think?

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