Maybe you didn’t notice this past 4th of July (while getting ready for the big fire works) the blatant attempt to limit the true value of all these social networks. Or perhaps you were too busy preparing for all the excitement of the German womens soccer team match against France when this happened.
Rafael was serious when he shared with Stephan Shankland about the development of a free tool to allow Facebook users to LEGALLY move their Facebook address book to Google . The tool was stopped by Facebook, but after additional engineering time to work within Facebook’s API and have a LEGAL one working again.
So, why should we care? And what does this have to do with E-Mail, online casino collaboration, communication?
In a word, everything.
The Open-Xchange platform has been built to enable users to make the fastest, easiest use of all the tools they have. Whether they be hardware tools (smartphones, tablets, PC’s), software (browsers, Outlook, Twitter) or their own data – business or personal (calendars, photos, documents, contacts). As content moves increasingly to the cloud it becomes increasingly important that you be able to decide how, when and even if you access, share or remove that data. This week we saw a really ugly side of what can happen when a company restricts the true value of going social: controlling your data.
The business implications of these kinds of moves exposes the actual model (or exchange of value) at hand: a freemium loss of rights for the content you generate. The obvious individual result is that platform access is being given away to attract the masses without a product in sight. These kinds of business models—where no true definition of a product is in sight but companies are gaining revenue—means that We are the product.
Keep an eye on this space, the home of the brave now resides in a place fighting for the rights of Open Data.