By Your data Shall They Know You
We are our data. This is the message of a really great paper I read today coming out of XTech 2005: XML, the Web and beyond by Leigh Dodds of Ingenta that talks about social networking and web services. It seems to me that developers need to pay close attention to web services if we are to realize the dream of powerful distributed collaboration networks, as defined by my friends a socialsignal.com.
The key point Dodds makes is that its the data, stupid. She defines a “social content” service as:
A service whose primary goal is to allow users to contribute and freely share data, a secondary goal of such services is to enable users to connect themselves to communities of interest either by direction participation, or indirectly as a side effect of data sharing.
The point is well taken. Bulletin boards can be extremely tedious and not so communicative. Long streams of discordant commentary are not useful. If you have some important data (an idea, a picture, a story, some statistics, some lists of things, some update information, etc.), having a serial discussion of it is the last thing you want to do. You want to distribute it as widely as possible so that it can have a widespread effect. This is what happens when an item you publish is linked via RSS to exposure points on a network of sites. It is an instant way of allowing data to explode onto the scene, while a single, unconnected instance of that data may take weeks to be distributed widely, if ever.
