Thoughts on Data

Musings

As life becomes more data driven, from Google’s knowledge of what we’re searching for to Facebook’s gathering of data about how we interact with each other, it brings to mind the way data is being used, how it’s changing; and the impact it has on our daily life.

Centralized Data

Facebook recently unveiled the Graph API, which presents a simple view of the Facebook social graph from people, photos and events to friend relationships, shared content, and photo tags all in one place. Twitter has recently entered the fray by billing themselves as being a Public Interest Graph as well. This centralization of data makes it easier for businesses and developers to tap into into people, so it’ll be interesting to see how everything plays out.

Decentralized Access

The web is more mobile than ever, with over 1 billion mobile Internet users predicted worldwide by 2013 (up from 450 million in 2009), people are getting more options when it comes to connecting to services they use. Facebook alone has over a dozen different ways to interface with their site, from Facebook Mobile to a native iPhone App to replying to comments via email or text message. This spiderweb like approach to interacting with services can only grow as time goes by.

Personalization Of Data

Facebook is leading the personalization front with their social plugins that have been popping up all around the net, enabling users to post pages from a site to their Facebook profile with one click. Server side personalization allows for recommendations of content that is relevant to a user’s interest, and on top of all this Facebook’s targeted advertising platform allows businesses to deploy content to specific target audiences based on demographics such as age, location, interest, and much more.

With the centralization of data, mobile access to services anywhere, and personalization of data; the web is becoming more integrated with life than ever before. Which is going to change the fundamentals of how we interact not only with the web, but with life itself.

Or maybe I’m just batshit insane.