[mindcrime]

One problem is that, yes, "Anyone can interact with anyone else, provided they mutually agree to do so," but they can only interact in the ways that Facebook defines and allows. You can't, for example, easily write your own app to run on whatever platform you happen to use (hell, maybe you want a "green screen" AS/400 app, who knows?) that lets you post to your friends' wall, or read their posts. And you can't easily load the data about your friends into a database that lets you query it... I mean, quick, how do you find "all my friends with birthdays in March" on Facebook? OK, that was a contrived, off-the-cuff example, but it gets to the point of the thing.

Sure I don't have an easy way to export my friends' data, but that is not my data--it's theirs.

That's arguable, IMO. If I have a list of my friends phone numbers and birthdays in a pen and paper address book, would you argue that I don't have the right to copy that book, or remix / reorganize / reuse the data in it, as I want (so long as I'm not violating my friends' rights somehow in the process, like spamming them)?

What we need is for Facebook / G+ etc. to adopt the work being done by the Semantic Web community and the Federated Social Web XG and open the "walled gardens." OR we need new platform(s) to emerge that do so, and for those platforms to supplant Facebook and the other centralized, dictatorial platforms.

[mgkimsal]

twitter/goog/facebook will, at some point, create a social CRM, or general PRM (personal relationship manager) with real, actionable, detailed functionality, but it will be enterprisey at a cost level, at least at first. Yes, total guess here on my part but...

When you've got detailed stats on hundreds of millions of users, and how they relate, yes, making money from ads is one revenue stream. The next will be selling that data back to us via nice database interfaces.

select * from followers_of_my_followers where birthday=today and interested in ('fashion','shoes','puppies'); followers.each { follower.message("Happy Birthday from frobozzco! click here for 20% off our new hushpuppies in neon green!"); }

We could pretty easily do that sort of stuff today if there was more of an opportunity for extraction/scraping/mining, but that's generally discouraged by the big players, because, I think, they're going to sell it back to us on a per-use or monthly fee.