[zipdog]

I question whether owning someone's data is really as valuable to cloud providers as the article assumes. Not that data isn't valuable, but if it becomes critically valuable and the companies refused to allow users to reclaim it to move to another service, I imagine a law would fix the problem.

Facebook has recognised that it isn't the data per-se that is so valuable, but the connections and relationships that are between that data and others.. ie the way that your data is able to interact with other people's data. The way to lock people in is when a person's data alone is insufficient for them.

A music collection is just a set of licenses for songs. If people have only licensed the songs on a particular service or device they might find it painful to leave but if that pain is less than the cost of maintaining the service then they will leave. But a music community built around song collections would be impossible to leave, unless everyone did at once, or the person was willing to leave the community itself (much harder to replace than songs).

[DanI-S]

This definitely seems true - which is interesting, since Apple and Google have both been floundering around unsuccessfully trying to create their own community experiences.

Facebook & co are really the prize here - whichever OS company can integrate the most deeply with existing social networks is going to come out on top. If either one of them can let go of the dream of having their own social network, they'll be able to move faster and get the edge.

I suspect that Google are more attached to that dream than Apple. However, they're arguably more capable of pulling it off.