In light of Facebook’s recent announcements there has been a number of things that came out of their f8 developer conference that has become topics of serious discussion. Of them the idea of something called the open graph is prompting some pretty interesting viewpoints to be expressed.
As interesting as this high level conversation may be it is something that is leaving a lot of people in the dust. Even the idea or concept of what open is causes most people’s eyes to glaze over and hit the next button. Unfortunately though this is at the core of what we are being sold by Facebook – the idea that everything they are doing is out in plain sight.
Facebook isn’t alone though in using this concept of open, as just about every Web 2.0 and social media start-up is using the word in some form or another. It doesn’t matter if it is a for profit company or some organization – open is the new buzzword. The problem is that just about in all cases they are talking about their own interpretation of the word.
At its core the concept of open is blindingly simple: Any web service will take in any data you decide to send their way and in return you can pull that data out plus anything that they might have added to it and use it where ever you want or store it where ever you want. This is done using methods of data transport and data structure that are considered to web and data standards.
In addition, and increasingly, open also means that this data is also available for other services to use and add to as well. At the core of this though is the fact that permission to share, and the degree of sharing, is suppose to lie with you the user. In theory this is a fantastic idea the problem is that when it comes to being implemented what we end up getting is nothing like what the theory says we should be getting.
