Like many, lurking till now, but this exchange is bringing me out of the shadows. This (easy-out) is a nice idea from the user perspective. But, speaking as the former evangelist for a universal id solution that would bring down the "walled gardens" of the web, big companies won't do this.
<br><br>They cling to every grain of competitive advantage they can get. The fact that I have a password for Travelocity and not for Expedia gives them an advantage that they refuse to give up, not matter how many more people overall would conduct travel transactions online if it were easier (smaller piece of potentially bigger pie? not worth the risk to them, they'd rather grip the piece of the market they own as tightly as they can).
<br><br>Therefore, most companies won't willingly want to let you take out the information you've put in, and take your business elsewhere "easily". Sure, some will. But most start-ups have it written right into their fundraising presentation: "once users start working with us, they are locked in and will find it very hard to leave." That's one of the ways they get that funding to give us all those cool widgets. And that's one of the reasons they get bought for millions of dollars by the big guys.
<br><br>The problem is that a slick interface and cool technology are in fact all too easy to copy, and once someone has come up with them, (tagging! IM!) they become commoditized. So if you take out the walled gardens and the locked-in-ness of data and the other competitive advantages of these companies that are not based on cool technology or good usability (not to mention if you take away their IP), you take away their ability to raise money and be acquired. Would MySpace have gotten bought if you could, with one click, remake your profile exactly as it exists, on someone else's social site? No.
<br><br>I think the only thing that can change this is user revolt (or people stopping being greedy - user revolt's a better bet). If we all refuse to use a company that locks in our data, then they will have to make it easy-out to get our business. But if something cool comes along online that we want to use (Blogger? Linked in? Flickr? Twitter? Feedburner?), our desire to use it may well override our desire for "easy-out" data.
<br><br>My fifty cents. Hope I don't get kicked off the list for bringing up some of the market forces working against distributed creativity. ;-)<br><br>Isabel<br><a href="http://blog.isabelhilborn.com">blog.isabelhilborn.com
</a><br><br><div><span class="gmail_quote">On 6/7/07, <b class="gmail_sendername">Andreas Schiffler</b> <<a href="mailto:aschiffler@ferzkopp.net" target="_blank" onclick="return top.js.OpenExtLink(window,event,this)">aschiffler@ferzkopp.net
</a>> wrote:</span><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
Peter Bihr wrote:<br>><br>> Maybe a standard, or badge, or commitment to some kind of standard<br>> body could be a way to go here, so that companies could adopt a<br>> standard of easy-in, easy-out as a sign of good quality and trust.
<br>> We'd all know what we're in for.<br>I was about to post a similar comment to my post before - advocating a<br>"Whitelist" of such 'quality' services. But I held it back, because it<br>
seems to be a very difficult problem to solve.
<br><br>These are some issues with whitelisting web20 services:<br>- to avoid digg-style hype it would need some sort of authority, which<br>goes against the 'feel' of web20<br>- requires a lot of work to have quality (
i.e. time for reviewing, etc.)<br>- is difficult to provide impartial information and not follow trends<br><br>Nevertheless such a body would be very useful - especially for cases<br>such as the "feedburner" buyout
<br>- users can help users deal with privacy issues<br>- forum can share information on how to facilitate easy-out's<br>- forum could suggest alternatives for easy-in's<br>- body could assists new services to reach an audience and critical-mass
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