This is completely tangental but I think it is wrong to see the internet as needing another feature in order to be complete. I think we really need a ground up re-think of data.
I remember diligently cataloging my movie preferences in LoveFilm, a UK Netflix competitor (when Netflix was a movie-by-mail company). I think I rated thousands of movies. I did the same in Netflix, certainly hundreds of films before they changed their rating scheme to thumbs up and "preference rating". Yet I have no access to this data.
We often talk about how much companies know about us. Google knows what search terms I search for. Facebook knows what content I slow down on while scrolling my feed. Youtube knows what videos I watch. My cell phone company probably knows the location of my cell every minute of the day. And outside of the horrible interfaces they have been regulated to provide me access to that data ... it is almost completely opaque to me.
Re-thinking data isn't the kind of thing a startup can do. I think we need to find legal mechanisms to really force companies to make data available to the originators of that data. IMO, that is the only way we salvage the Internet.
>Re-thinking data isn't the kind of thing a startup can do. I think we need to find legal mechanisms to really force companies to make data available to the originators of that data. IMO, that is the only way we salvage the Internet.
You are completely correct, but unfortunately it's not fun and quite frustrating to work with government, and you're competing with lobbyists that Facebook and Google have a financial interest in supporting.
It's a lot easier and more glamorous to just throw some JavaScript at the low-hanging fruit.
(As someone who did the same with Netflix and was really devastated they changed their UI there, you can at least go to your rating history and they still--last time I checked--give you the old ratings in their old format, so you can scrape that page and then have not lost your rating effort. I don't say this to in any way disagree with you: just to try to help a fellow ratings-keeper.)
I remember diligently cataloging my movie preferences in LoveFilm, a UK Netflix competitor (when Netflix was a movie-by-mail company). I think I rated thousands of movies. I did the same in Netflix, certainly hundreds of films before they changed their rating scheme to thumbs up and "preference rating". Yet I have no access to this data.
We often talk about how much companies know about us. Google knows what search terms I search for. Facebook knows what content I slow down on while scrolling my feed. Youtube knows what videos I watch. My cell phone company probably knows the location of my cell every minute of the day. And outside of the horrible interfaces they have been regulated to provide me access to that data ... it is almost completely opaque to me.
Re-thinking data isn't the kind of thing a startup can do. I think we need to find legal mechanisms to really force companies to make data available to the originators of that data. IMO, that is the only way we salvage the Internet.