This post is surely going to raise eyebrows as it pushes the boundaries (probably crosses them) of what we know as privacy. Wired asks the question Should web giants let startups use the information they have about you?. It is a very valid question. Companies like Google, Yahoo, Ebay, Amazon, and even Craigslist (used in the story) have tons of data, some of it that they perhaps never utilize in ways that might be useful to some people. Does it help them to lock up that data or is it better to share at least some of that data, and thus unlock useful information, with the rest of the ecosystem?

Amazon has done a pretty good job of allowing people to build services on top of either their compute resources or set up online store. Companies like Lijit have built very powerful services using published APIs. However we are now talking at a different level of granularity. In my life science blog, I have often argued about the intrinsic value of data, or lack thereof. In other words, the value of data comes from what you do with it. Not everyone has the same interests or needs. One option is to lock the data away, using it for your needs. Another is to open at least some parts of it up, in a way the equivalent of what Amazon has done with computing resources, to treat some aspects of data as a commodity, and allow developers to build services on top of the underlying data. It has always been my opinion that people look at data differently and derive different information content from it. Google could choose to make some of its underlying data available to people who can present information in a different way than Google might want to. The company can probably build in non-compete safeguards into any API/access to information. We will all be richer for it, and I suspect the Google’s of the world will also benefit in the long run as an ecosystem builds around data services.

Google, Yahoo, etc already provide access to a lot of data, but I believe that we are talking about access at a different level here. In addition, instead of dancing around the bushes, lets put some standards down, develop a set of data sharing and utilization rules (no spam, etc), and take the programmable web to its logical place, an open ecosystem of data, collected by a few, but leveraged by many.

Technorati Tags: Information, SaaS, Open Data