Business Model Design for Web Services Lesson #869579493: Data portability is something that’s important for “consumers” but vital for commercial users (musicians, Comcast, etc).
It’s also non-trivial to implement and gives most strategists the heebie jeebies (even though we all know that being an indispensable part of data flows is more strategically defensible than restricting access to data; collaborative advantage v. competitive advantage).
Everything doesn’t have to be free, you know. Why not charge people for data portability? It’s not in the Bill of Rights ;-)
Further clarification:
I suppose what I’m saying is: although I’m as big a techno-hippie as the next guy, and even though I believe strongly that it is strategically advantageous *not* to charge for data portability, it’s still a “feature” at this point that solves a problem (and that’s the only way to get people to pay you).
Open Social, DataPortability, et al, are the primordial soup of the singularity: stay tuned for more on the evolution of technology-mediated existence ;-)
(image via www.lukewalker.org)
