data portability metaphors and similes

contributors:

The New Viral Marketing

What viral marketing was to the twentieth century Internet, data portability is to the twenty first.

With viral marketing, businesses built word of mouth into their products. So by using Hotmail, you told your friends about the service. 

With data portability, your identity is rich with social information. The very way people interact with strangers, friends, and companies will come with their social graphs, with their onlives.

Data portability is the new viral.

The Jericho Defrag

Imagine an enormous room, like an aircraft hanger. That's the Internet.

On the floor of the hanger small spaces divide the big room. Each of those web sites have walls that mark their boundaries. You can have a great time in each room, building up social capital. But the walls keep your social capital locked up. When you move from room to room, you leave your social network behind. If you look at the big room as a whole, you'll see your fragmented social capital spread in little bits all over the places.

Data portability knocks those walls down. It opens up the big room so you can step from site to site with your social capital intact. Borders, once defined by walls, are now markings on the floor, guides to what you can do with your social graph on that site.

Nouns and Verbs

A person's social graph is all nouns. Data describing you, the people and organizations in your onlife, and the history of your relationships with them.

Sites are verbs. They are actions that operate upon your nouns. They bring your nouns to life, applying unique world views, cultural norms, commercial services, and technical capabilities to your social graph.

Defusing the Social Graph Hostage Situation

Site operators hold your social graph data hostage. No matter what you do, they won't let your data leave.

DataPortability.org is the hostage negotiator, and data portability is the win-win negotiation strategy.

The Bank

Your data is like a currency: you exchange your data to a website, and in exchange they give you access, because they make money from the advertising. Imagine being able to store all your data, the currency of the information age, in a bank. And like we do with electronic funds, you can access your 'cash' wherever you are - knowing that your data is safe in the one place and always accessible.

The Marketplace

Imagine going shopping to a market, to buy some new cool things. You need money right? What happens if every one of those vendors, requires you to pay in a different currency. Wouldn't it be good, if everyone in the marketplace spoke the same language, so you could transact with everyone without having to think about currency exchange. And imagine, the 'change' you get from one vendor after breaking a big note, could be used on another vendor that uses the same currency. Getting everyone using the same standard form of exchange, makes it easier for everyone.

The Cure for Social Network Overload

Too much information from too many friends? Mailbox overflowing with invitations? Data portability quiets that noise.

The First Race to the Moon

Massive goal. Very clear definition. Literally impossible using current technology. Directed, multi-year effort.

Strategies: Invest in science and engineering. Multiple stages (Mercury, Gemini, Apollo), each of which teach you something.  Invent and test, iteratively.

The New Ad Click

Before, when you advertised online, someone clicked through to you and you knew nothing about them.

So you treated them generically. And your conversion rates were miniscule. 

Now, with data portability, people come to you with rich profiles and fresh social graphs. You know all about them. 

So you treat them personally, creating useful, compelling, engaging, meaningful experiences. 

And your conversion rates, and loyalty, grow wildly.