The old saying ‘Information is power’ has never been more true in the Online environment. With Search Engines and Social Media sites ratcheting up billions in advertising revenue simply by collating all the data that is freely available out there, its becoming quite a literally ‘a free for all’.
But where do they get all this free information and data from, and who writes it all? From Us. Me and you. As the amount of personal information about us all is being voluntarily uploaded via Social networking media, the web Megaliths like Google with its massive collating and repository resources, consume it heartily as its daily bread and butter.
All tends to sound a bit neurotic I know, but I often talk to cautious web users who are almost phobic about signing up to anything that snaps of social media irresponsibility. And in many ways I can’t blame them. I did think this was more down to a fear of the great ‘online unknown’ and a paranoia of all things technological. But could there also be a smattering of our naivity and passiveness creeping in, as Google street view cameras capture us and our homes in greater and greater detail (now 3D!).
We can so easily fall in love with our online social media apps and tools. They’re free but for a good reason. Very large amounts of data yield a proportionately increasing commercial return when packaged and served up correctly.
For a moment let’s indulge the scenario that all you have ever published on the web doesn’t ever disappear, but is archived. Archiving does make it sound all respectable and safe but data is archived rather than deleted for a reason, i.e. for future reference.
A recent move by US Library of Congress to archive every tweet ever posted publicly perhaps has come as a bit of a surprise. Its reasoning is that all our tweets will form a valuable social commentary of historical events – including all its momentous and trivial moments as they unfold in our public and often our private lives.
Is it my inherent distrust of government tinkering in our webspace or their moves to archive ‘Our’ information without ‘Our’ consent that sets my paranoic alarm bells clanging?
Embed me
There is also a massive surge towards sharing and embedding our social media interactions outside of their current Social Media framework, perhaps as a way of unifying all our separate online social involvements rather than having to start again from scratch every time there is a new kid on the block.
All reputable Social media sites and others including Google invariably have API tools so that content can hooked up to and extracted, repurposed, mashed up and processed on other sites.
A n example of this that proked some online controversy recently was the API-mashing of the site foursquare.com. This site leverages Twitter/Facebook live tweets to provide geographical local town movements we care to relay via mobiles etc in real time.
The site Pleaserobme.com then used Foursquare’s API to build its own site to highlight how easy it was to take all this shared information about individuals who had given their own home address, and using their realtime tweeting about their whereabouts could then publish which homes would be empty at any given (real)time.
The site now seems to have removed this feature, but made very a serious point: how easy it is to ‘pull’ in real-time social media data and for the wrong purposes, and also the fact that no-one is really regulating this type of embedded exploitation (self regulation aside).
The embedding of data is now becoming much easier and commonplace. Twitter has now announced its @anywhere tweet option, which will allow you to tweet your comments via other media sites that have this facility, (rather than via the SM bookmark icon)
There may well be virtuous ’drivers’ to develop a universally and socially coherent platform for us all to enjoy , although its more likely its do with a fear of a levelling off in interest (as has happened in Twitter recently) and consequent financial freefall ( the demise of Bebo) which commercially motivates the drive for Social Media sharing just to stay ahead of the competition.
And lets face it, their success and livelihood is built around how easy and frequently we can post our views and opinions, including our most throwaway comments – which of course aren’t actually thrown away.
Some web links:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8621297.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8570293.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8521598.stm
