Is Being Open Now a Priority for Facebook?

By David Recordon

If you’ve been reading TechMeme, TechCrunch, ReadWriteWeb, Mashable!, or many other blogs today, you’ll know that Google, Plaxo, and Facebook have now joined DataPortability.org. While it certainly isn’t surprising to see Plaxo and Google join, some are making it seem as if Facebook’s inclusion makes this a history-changing day for the Internet. I’m not convinced.

Facebook already supports the microformat hCard on public profile pages, which as far as I can tell is the only DataPortability.org standard Facebook supports beyond private RSS feeds. Facebook has always had a history of saying it wants to support open standards, as Mark Zuckerberg implied at Web 2.0 Summit last year by calling not being open a “flaw in the system.” Zuckerberg did say that he thinks the social graph “is the user’s data,” so might this actually be a real step in the right direction? In the past, when asking Facebook about supporting open technologies, like those which are a part of the DataPortability.org stack, company officials always replied that, as Facebook was still a small company, they didn’t have the resources to do so. What changed between a few months ago and today that all of a sudden supporting these technologies is a real business priority?

The real question of the day is if Facebook will follow through on its support of the DataPortability.org mission, “To put all existing technologies and initiatives in context to create a reference design for end-to-end Data Portability. To promote that design to the developer, vendor and end-user community.” Or if this is just a marketing tactic given the issues from last week?

(Via O’Reilly Radar.)

Open Terminal

Gate 4 in Terminal 2 of Sky Harbor International Airport in Phoenix, AZ is not meant to be used.

Behind the black stanchions, the roughly 50 x 50 foot space has no TV, no gift stand, no seats; just a row of outlets, a few windows, and a single column supporting the mostly uninterrupted, open space. Which of course makes it a perfect space for kids to wrestle and run, for strollers to park, and for bloggers to plugin their laptops and cellphones and lounge on the floor for a few restful minutes. It’s just a big, empty playroom — and a breath of fresh air, particularly after standing in line for an hour, when your departure gate is crammed, and you’re about to spend the next 5½ hours of your life hunched over your knees in steerage.

I suppose it only works because the space was relatively uncrowded — the black ropes keeping most out, but having no affect on those who toddle right under them, or the rest whose craving for free electricty overrides the risk of a stern talking to. The space probably would not have worked if this were an actual functioning departure gate. I suppose all the rigid rows of plastic seats are a good way of making sure luggage and bodies don’t collide.

But it seems like a fine idea — a sort of indoor, public park. I wish more places had uninterrupted, unstructured, uncommercialized open space. More airports should do this.

(Via Social Design Notes.)

Value of Public Data

By Nat Torkington

It’s long been known that the US Census Bureau’s TIGER dataset bootstrapped the booming US geospatial industry. Many other countries haven’t had free access to their public data, and this has correspondingly retarded their local geospatial industries. There was a fascinating article in The Guardian about the value of public data, containing this great line: The government’s chief adviser on the subject has told ministers that the archive could be worth hundreds of billions of pounds to the national economy, rather than hundreds of millions previously estimated.

We’ve been watching and working with Carl Malamud, Larry Lessig, and projects like public.resource.org as they fight to free public information that’s senselessly behind paywalls. We’ve felt for a long time that efficient markets require ubiquitous information and it’s good to have respectable institutions (unlike we scurrilous Internet companies who obviously just want to push our hippy agendas or our own businesses) like the British Government beginning to realize that opening public data creates large amounts of private and public value.

We’re only at the start of opening public data. The British Government is still to take substantial action to open public data—significantly, the Ordnance Survey still have their clammy greedy fingers on the public geospatial data. There will be dozens (hundreds) of exciting business built when this and other public data are opened, delivering value that wasn’t possible from the closed data.

(Via O’Reilly Radar.)