Cloud Computing: Social Networks Continue Push For Control
December 6, 2012
Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Thomas Claburn.
Social networking shouldn’t be compulsory, and yet it’s becoming an obligation. The hunger among Internet companies for data about who you are, what you do, where you go, and who you know keeps growing. They want you to share so they can earn. So they have violated Communication Neutrality: They have made mechanisms for expression into vehicles for marketing, forcing those who participate in online life to promote.
Social networking has become inescapable. Startups often require a Facebook or Twitter login. Google now requires a Google+ account to post app reviews on Google Play. And in many lines of knowledge work, including journalism, participation in these networks has become a job requirement…
The latest entry in the field comes from Microsoft, which has just opened a social network of its own, the aptly named so.cl. Evidently, the world needs more sharing. Or it would, if social networks were actually about sharing. The irony of the constant cajoling to share more, of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s self-serving predictions that everyone will share more in the future, is that social networks themselves limit how they share the data they’ve collected. They don’t so much share as restrict, through contractual API limitations, through incomplete export capabilities, through burdensome processes, under the pretense of user protection, or to spite the competition…
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