http://www.siliconvalleysleuth.com/2007/06/intel-envisions.html

I think platform’s like Talis should focus on data that could benefit non social network applications and mashups. Rather than Facebook, which appeals to egos, Talis and other data neutral efforts should focus on the dollars and sense of government. Their is a real benefit if we could be more closely monitoring what government is spending money on and ways to decrease government expenditures.

Without some compelling alternatives, the ‘on the web’ Platforms like Facebook probably have a far longer life than the year you give them.

Many of those 24million Facebook users are probably perfectly happy with what they have. It’ll take more than an ‘open data’ argument to make them shift allegiance.

So here’s the thing; how to make ‘linked and open data’ the next cool and fashionable must-have for the typical Facebook user… and answers can’t include ‘triple’, ‘RDF’, api’, ‘data’, ‘uri’, ‘REST’, ‘triple’, or any of the other arcana to which we turn in explaining what we mean to one another.

To anthropomorphise these things a little (probably too much!), there’s almost a selfishness about the services that simply expose data on the web; they’re taking, without giving much/anything back to the wider Web in return. That’s not to suggest that their users don’t receive some value from the site, but the wider commons certainly misses out.

The difficulty, I guess, is in persuading regular users – and app creators – that there is a bigger market for their ideas out on the open web. 24million is plenty big enough for most!

Andrew McAfee, associate professor at Harvard Business School and the man who coined the Enterprise 2.0 term, has been advocating a ‘flip test’ for assessing the likely impact of new technologies. He got the idea from Professor Stanley Crouch. Presumably

This all comes down to an interesting Dichotomy relative to the Web:

1. Platforms for Exposing Data & Services On The Web

2. Platforms for Injecting Data & Services Into The Web

If the end result (output) of platform usage / incorporation doesn’t result in Web Resolvable Identifiers for Conceptual Entities (URIs or IRIs) in the domain covered by the Platform, then at best it is emitting Domain Specific Data “On To The Web” i.e. the Data is “Mash-able” but not “Mesh-able”.

As I’ve postulated for eons (internet time), we are dealing with exposure of individual perspectives via data containers best described as “Data Spaces” (ultimately). This is a important but often misunderstood concept (btw – you got it right in your post on the subject). In due course I expect the concept to “self crystallize” since “Objects” and associated “Values” that connect us are becoming clearer by the second (again, Internet time) The Web is more about “Presence” than “Web Sites” or “Web Services” or “Web Data”. The points of “Web Presence” are evolving rapidly.

btw – Semantic Data Web middleware can take Facebook Data “on the Web” and Inject “into the Web”. In a nutshell, I am saying that FQL & Facebooks REST services will be emitting Triples very soon via the Virtuoso RDFizer known as the “Sponger” So we will have dereferencable URI/IRS (i.e. Entity Identifiers that act as data pointers) for Facebook data alongside Googlebase, Amazon, eBay and other Web Services Providers.