[thegooley]

It's interesting that people seem to have suddenly started talking about data ownership much more lately.

We have been working on a project called TheMux [1] that aims to create a data platform (for lack of a better term) which helps you to pull in and archive your data from various sources and apply some simple normalization. We're specifically working on ways to keep both content (blog posts, photos, status updates, etc) and datum (health info, workouts, communication data, etc) in a form where you a) have full control of the raw data and b) can make select data available to external apps which do things like presentation and analysis.

Our goal is to create an open-source platform to address some of these questions around data ownership, access and portability. Imagine the day when you decide that you want to move your blog from Tumblebook to Posterpress and you can do that by simply creating a new account on Posterpress and granting it access to your existing data. Or you've been using JogKeeper but then you find this great new service called SprintTracker that you want to try out - and all you need to do is connect and it will have your years worth of running data.

And we think that something like this will also make it much simpler for SaaS developers to compete not by customer lock-in but rather by providing superior products and continually working to make the customer happy.

We're taking it slowly right now to build this platform which we will open-source under a permissive license (as soon as it's a little more mature) by first building a few consumer-oriented services on top of it. Number 1 on our list is a blog-type website based on this MuxDB concept and that's what we're working on at the moment.

If you're interested in giving us your thoughts (or help, or tell us we're crazy, or whatever), my email is in my profile.

[1] http://theMux.com

[leot]

I've been advocating (to friends) the need/inevitability of this kind of system.

One possible marketing phrase that's been thrown around is "data asymmetry", as in "TheMux aims to rectify the massive data asymmetries that give Facebook and Google orders of magnitude more power than their users."

Even better would be the development of a completely peer-to-peer version of Facebook (which Diaspora isn't).

[thegooley]

Nice phrase, I'll have to keep that in mind - at least when talking to hackers.

Re: replacement of Facebook, I don't think it's realistic for someone to develop an actually decent federated replacement for a true social network. The difficulty of doing some of the stuff that Facebook users like, but trying to make it work when all of the nodes are on different networks with different constraints, seems to be very high.

I'm not so much in the "Facebook shouldn't have my data" camp... more like the "I want control of my all data TOO" camp.

Our concept for people writing apps that leverage TheMux doesn't require them to actually load data live from their user's instance of TheMux (because that's crazy, a single point of failure, and probably very inefficient) but that there is simply the agreement to interchange data.

To steal your phrase - we want to make the data symmetric.

So that no matter where I create or update my data, the systems involved makes a best-effort to return that data to my MuxDB, and then my MuxDB will make a best-effort to get that data out to the sites I've authorized and who need the data to do what I've signed up for.

Obviously, we're still in the early stages, but it's been an exciting and challenging journey so far.