The view of these two birdges symbolically represents the two directions that end-users flow. 

Some of them swarm in, as they are doing at MySpace - at the rate of 250,000 a day.  They sign-up, upload their faces and commence to ‘be friendly’.  They bring in value, attention, content and conversations.

The other bridge represents those same people - moving on.  What goes in must come out.  The value that comes out is what Fox or Yahoo or AOL or the other vendors haven’t sucked out of your clicks.  They’re monetizing you just ‘for being there’ and having fun.  Seems like a fair deal - huh?

Well there are those who’ll tell yah - we need to get some of value back - onto our plates.

There’s some who’ll tell yah that it’s your god-givien right to take that exit bridge and move your content, data and relationships - to anywhere you see fit!

There are some prophets and soothsayers who offer you a fake bill of goods, only to try and entrap you in their ‘poorly occluded’ lock-in strategy. All sorts of these situations are going on right now. Every combination of good and evil you can imagine - all colliding at some wikipedia page (NOT.)   Data silos are opening up, while new sticky gardens of lockup and being established.

As the Beastie Boys say: “we gotta fight for our right to party” and whether you’re heading to Brooklyn, the suburbs of Sam Francisco or some lonely farm town outside of Trieste, Italy - we can all mesh together and build our own eco-systems.  Its those distributed meshed together systems that we are striving for.

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 16th, 2006 at 3:56 pm and is filed under . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.