Sean 's Public Library

4. Data in, data out?

API’s are a corner stone to the emerging mesh of services that sit on top of and around platforms. The data flows from service providers should, where possible, be two way. Services that consume an API should publish one of their own. The data ownership issues among these services is going to become increasingly complex. I believe that users have the primary rights to their data and the applications that users select have a proxy right, as do other users who annotate and comment on the data set. If you accept that as a reasonable proposition, then it follows that service providers should have an obligation to let users export that data and also let other services providers “plug into” that data stream. The compact I outline above is meaningfully different to what some platforms offer today. Facebook asserts ownership rights over the data you place in its domain; in most cases the data is not exportable by the user or another service provider (e.g., I cannot export my Facebook pictures to Flickr, nor wire up my feed of pictures from Facebook to Twitter). Furthermore if I leave Facebook they still assert  rights to my images.   I know this is technically the easiest answer. Having to delete pictures that are now embedded in other people’s feed is a complex user experience but I think that’s what we should expect of these platforms. The problem is far simplier if you just link to things and then promote standards for interconnections. These standards exist today in the form of RSS, or Activity Streams — pick your flavor and let users move data from site to site and let users store and save their data.