I posted the following entry in EnThinnai blog. But since the idea is of general interest, I am reposting here.
With the rise of social networks, a sizable number of people have expressed concern that user generated content is being locked up in hands of a few who benefit enormously. To protect this, these networks have hindered attempts by users to port the data from one network to another, confirming the concerns expressed by the first group. In a recent post, Abhishek Tiwari echoes these concerns and suggests that these networks should enable web-service access to these data. To a large extent this is the idea behind OAuth and OpenSocial from Google. Bill Wishon while commenting on this post observes that large networks like Amazon and Facebook have no incentive to share the data. So it appears to me that an alternate solution would be for users to save a copy of the data they generate in these sites for later use. During the days of typewriters, we used carbon paper to make a copy as we typed; email clients routinely save a copy of the mail we send out. So why not the browsers make a copy of the data that we generate at these sites? To elaborate further, I am suggesting that a plug-in for the browser that will scrape the local screen, collect the data as it is being generated and uploaded to the social networking site. Thus collected data can be stored either locally or if further sharing is required, in a user-controlled server residing on the public Internet. Not surprisingly, I am thinking of EnThinnai here. Since EnThinnai provides controlled access to the stored data, users can decide which other third parties can access which portion of the stored data and when.
Posted by aswath at December 5, 2007 08:47 AM