Past few days, what with the Robert Scoble incident, and then the post incident stuff, things have been under fire for Facebook, but more importantly, the case for ‘open-data’ has been growing stronger. People suddenly want access to their data outside Facebook¹, which is a little blind sighting the fact that it’s because people run rampant with their habits on Facebook, they have had to take measures to keep things under control.

The bane of all things great

Security.

It’s the one thing that drives any database. Especially if it’s a database which contains info about every move you’ve ever made. Facebook is such a database. People post pictures from parties, put up their relationship status’, say and do things, in short, run completely amok with their new found identity online. There is a big reason why people feel comfortable doing so.

Privacy. Facebook has some of the most complicated privacy features I’ve ever seen in any service. Its concept of relationships is to be marvelled at, and unfortunately, it’s those same concepts and complications that make it hard to decide who can get what data out of Facebook about who.

Sure, the F8 platform is there, and for those who want to take the time and effort to use it, will get almost any data that they want — this being again decided by how the two people are related. But let’s have a look at some statistics:

According to Adonomics, there are about 60 million active users in the past 30 days. Averaging that, means 2 million a day. There are currently 168,000+ developers. That’s just about 8.4% of the actual daily population visiting Facebook. We all know there are much more than 2 million users.

Those of us who add applications, know that we add them without thinking twice. People like me who know exactly what kind of applications they want, are more cautious, but about 90% of the population isn’t. Which means that all the applications they’ve added, have access to pretty much all the data there is on Facebook about them. This is bad enough. Imagine an application having access to the data of all the friends of this person as well, their friends, how they’re related. What if the friends didn’t want this data available? This moves towards a privacy issue out of Facebook’s hands. And they can’t let that happen, especially with having faced flak for the same in the past.

Why just Facebook?

Google joined the workgroup as well, with their Orkut. I personally think of Orkut as a social-cobweb, not so much as a network. There have been enough reports of fake profiles, terrorist activities, stalking and what not on this one network alone. It’s like privacy never even existed. Unless things have changed since I stopped using it, making your data publicly available outside Orkut doesn’t really change anything for you. You were as exposed back then as you are now.

However, that is the perfect example of what happens when privacy deteriorates. OpenSocial, is a mess. Not even close to complete, and the screencast of it being demo-ed showed how non-game-changing it’ll actually be when it is released, probably a year from now.

Surprisingly, I don’t see other (big) social-networks like MySpace, Bebo, Friendster rushing to join up and kick some dirt up. Except for MySpace, it doesn’t matter really. But MySpace joining making things open will make things interesting, sure.

Finally, making data available is always a good thing. One might say that if you don’t want people to know something, don’t put it up on the web. But people should be free to put up whatever they want. It’s up to the network to give them enough tools and features to decide who gets to see those things. That’s what differentiates a good network from a mediocre one.

Biggies like Facebook have always been on the right track, and the users have accepted everything that has come their way. Now that they’ve joined DataPortability, I don’t how much of a difference it’ll make. I’m very sure that they will never release ‘all’ their data about you for other services to harvest and use. After all, you should still want to go back to Facebook. But I guess they saw this step coming, and it’ll be interesting to see how things change in the coming months.