Facebook: Worth it? + Data portability

This screenshot highlights the negatives of facebook pretty well. A lot of it is just meandering pointless time wasting - but I think those who espouse the negatives are really missing out on it’s main useful function; to take a loosely coupled social/organisational group and give it instant organisational structure and power.

Anyone who’s used facebook in a college situation knows this intrinsically; it’s the people outside these closed-circuit-loops, the sole entrepreneur trying to use it for maintaining business contacts for example - they’re out I think.

It’s a vastly important tool for what it’s good at, and as long as you ignore the rest then it’s well worth the small time investment. It’s just a stepping stone too - ideally the data portability movement will be involved in the next stage in social network evolution. It maybe that facebook evolves with it, but essentially data portability, if implemented correctly, will mean that the providers have to become competitive on features rather than data lock-in.

Data portability video:

DataPortability - Connect, Control, Share, Remix from Smashcut Media on Vimeo.

Interestingly, a post from an Irish blogger comes up 6th in a search for Data Portability on Google.com. That post is where I found the vimeo video embedded above.

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