James Osborn

In the old world businesses would make it as difficult as humanly possible for consumers to move from their service to a competitors. This makes economic sense, after all… people are less likely to want to move if it involves effort, if they don’t get the equivalent service elsewhere or if something (such as a blog entry) is lost. So why, in the last few years have we seen a sudden move towards ‘openness’ and transparency. Everything from social networks such as Facebook and MySpace to new blogging platforms such as ‘SquareSpace’ now preach that the users own their data… not the companies.

The answer is simple, it’s what the customer demands. Free and easy movement of information is a fundamental principle of the web and we are now in a position both technically and socially where we as consumers can demand this from our applications. However if indeed sites suddenly become democratised we appear to start on a slippery slope. Where does consumer input stop and the needs of the business start?

Facebook recently asked its users to help rewrite their ‘terms of service‘ after a controversy that hit the web hard. The legal agreement proclaimed:

Although the founder of Facebook responded to the event and said it was simply to cover the company legally, users were quite rightly outraged and Facebook was forced to change the agreement.

This flip-flopping not only demonstrates how passionate users feel about the sites they use but the power they wield over website owners. This therefore leads me to ask at what point sites can act autonomously and wonder whether this continued democratisation spawned by the wiki way back in 2001 will result in a much more open web and a changing model of business for companies now entering the internet arena.