The Divergence of Social Data
Here’s the short story. Andreas Weigend, a professor at Stanford and the former Chief Scientist at Amazon, explained his ideas on “Social Data” in preparation for his keynote at the Data 2.0 Conference. Here’s an excerpt from the Harvard Business Review:
“The second data revolution brought about a new dimension to data creation: users started to actively contribute explicit data such as information about themselves, their friends, or about the items they purchased. These data went far beyond the click-and-search data that characterized the first decade of the web.” - Harvard Business Review, May 20th 2009
When I was preparing for the Advertising Equation panel, conversations with Miten Sampat from Quova developed into a concept of a “Data Narrative” where all of the social data, contextual data, historic data, and behavioral data of a user interacting with a website leads to preference analysis, new user metrics, and more plastic engagement. What should I show this user- what can I learn from this user- based on his social data narrative?
Yet talking to Terry Jones from FluidInfo led to my social data schizophrenia. Terry told me that FluidInfo is unique because “it makes data social”. I laughed on the call, citing how our conference had a keynote with nearly the same “phrase”, yet an almost inverted perspective. FluidInfo makes data social by allowing any 3rd party app to save new data objects into the same database as any other 3rd party app. This adaptive centralization of data allows any data object to connect to or “socialize with” any other data object in an ever-evolving singular objective structure. In other words, its not the users who are social- the data itself is social.
“In a world of truly social data, any user will be able to customize or personalize anything. You’ll be able to say “I ate there” or “that’s cool” or “that sucks!” or “I know that person” or “I want one of them” or “I’ve read that” or “Hey mum, look at this” or …. or do pretty much whatever you want. I can think of hundreds of examples, making them up at will—you only have to think of the kinds of things you’re used to doing in the real world. Your contributions will be just as important as any other. You’ll be able to search based on your data, or any selection of your friends’ data. You’ll be able to combine your information with heterogeneous information created by others. You’ll be able to augment, organize, and selectively share information as you please.” - FluidInfo Blog, August 24th, 2009
One could argue these two perspectives are aligned. Both embrace the rise of user-generated data and the importance of allowing for creativity and adaptability in online data creation. Yet they are divergent in a subtle way. Weigend’s “social data” embraces an unstructured decentralized avalanche of relationships between users and their websites. Meaningful websites will engage users via social data. FluidInfo’s “making data social” posits an ideal direct singular relationship between a user and his data- almost independent of any one website. Is “social data” our engagement with websites and each other- or is “social data” our relationship to the underlying data itself?
I could be imagining the divergence but I still enjoy the irony. One thing is definite- the topic of social data is not going to go away any time soon.
