Data dynamics: How the rules of sharing are changing

Today it’s easy to store and share my pictures, my favorite URLs, my thoughts and lots of other things online. There are a range of data repositories that allow me to do this kind of thing in different ways.

What still needs work is how I give trusted services access to much more private data — things like my current location, my spending behavior, access to my friends and family, etc.

To date, most services follow the premise that the looser the controls, the more fluidly data will travel. And that’s all that mattered when it was still hard to get data flowing.

Data flow is no longer an issue. Perhaps data flow has actually become too easy now. And therein lies the problem.

Clearly, blogging, RSS and feed readers drove a lot of the early thinking about syndication. Blogging enabled people to post content in a publicly accessible data repository somewhere for anyone to pull out without any privacy or permissioning controls. The further your content then syndicated, the better.

Wikis and community sites like Slashdot created a slightly more complex read/write dynamic against the central content repository that lots of people could access together. The permissioning model was essentially hierarchical where controls were kept in the hands of a smaller community.

Then Flickr broke ground with a new approach. They applied a user-centric friends and family relationship model to permissioning access to personal photos. Flickr opened up what was once considered private data and defaulted it to a public read-only permission status. But each individual still has a great deal of control over the data he or she contributes.

Similarly, del.icio.us made it possible to store and publicly address what had previously been private data. The nice twist here was the easy-to-understand URLs that allowed machines to consume, interpret and redistribute data stored in del.icio.us.

Where services like Facebook and Wesabe are now breaking ground again is in identifying a security model around highly sensitive data. Contact lists are very personal, but there aren’t many data sets more personal than my purchases and spending patterns.

Neat things can happen when I give machines access to my data, both the things I explicitly ‘own’ and my implicit behaviors. I want machines to act on my behalf and make my data more useful to me in a range of different contexts.

For example, I like the fact that Facebook slurps up my Twitter activity and shares it with my friends in the Facebook network. I don’t want to change my ‘status’ on every service that shows status messages. Similarly, I like that Last.fm captures my listening behavior from iTunes and then uses that data to give back personal recommendations on a badge posted to my blog.

Allowing machines to automatically act on personal data on my bahalf is the right direction for things to go. But important questions need to be resolved.

For example, what happens to my data in all the places I’ve allowed it to appear when I change it? How do permissions pass from one service to another? How do I guarantee that a permission type I grant in one service means the same thing in another service? How do changes propagate? How does consent get revoked?

And even trickier than all that will be the methods for enforcing protection of privacy and penalties for breaking those permissions.

Until trust is measurable with explicit consentual triggers, loosely coupled networks that act on the data I wish to protect are going to struggle to talk to each other. Standards need to enable common sharing tactics. Responsibility needs to be clearly defined. And policies need to be enforceable.

Empowering a person to invest in storing and sharing the more sensitive data he or she owns is going to require a lot more than traditional read/write controls. But given the pace of change right now I suspect the answers will happen as the people behind these services work things out together before the industry taskforces, legal entities and blogosphere sort it out for them.

Ikea ruined my floors

My second child is due next week. I intended to reconfigure our 1-bedroom house to create 2-bedrooms so that all 4 of us and the dog could spread out a bit.

Some amazing software from Google and Ikea made me feel more ambitious.

Now I have 2 unfinished bedrooms, a new but incomplete kitchen, dust in places I didn’t think dust could find, large and somewhat dangerous gaps in the floors and a couple of contractor battle scars. The new baby won’t remember the state of things, but no doubt my wife will keep the memory alive for years to come.


It all started with SketchUp. I spent several hours mapping out our house trying to assess what was possible. I was able to move walls around in a 3D model and imagine with some accuracy what it would be like to live in our remodelled house.

This visualization gave me language and vision to communicate with contractors and helped me budget the work. It also gave me the confidence to make some more dramatic changes than what we conceived in our heads.

What could have been a day or two of demolition and some simple framing work turned into major structural work that altered the feel of the house entirely.


Then, as we were closing down on the scope of the project and looking to finish in early August with plenty of time to spare, I started playing with Ikea’s downloadable kitchen planner software. Despite our time and budget constraints I couldn’t resist the idea of planning ahead a little.

After you design the space and create your grid, you choose cabinets from Ikea’s collection. You drag and drop them on the canvas and fit them together the way you want. It’s actually a lot of fun despite being very buggy.

When you give buyers power and easy onramps to services you turn them into valuable customers instead of just drive-by shoppers. Here’s how they hook you into buying from their shop…

Once you can see your kitchen in 3D and move it around and pretend to cook in it, you can then click to see a price sheet for your plan. Ikea, as you know, is very reasonably priced. So, suddenly you feel like you can afford an awesome new kitchen.

Now all I could think of was how to adjust our plans so that we could afford a new kitchen. I was also anxious to see if the kitchens looked ok or if they looked like the other prefab swedish lego blocks you often get from Ikea.

Ikea’s software is brilliant on several levels…

First, I’m much less likely to try another vendor once I’ve already perfected my plan. Second, they have enough range in their designs that you can’t help but think that one of the choices there will work. Third, you can essentially go out and get your kitchen now. They have to help you work out a few details, but you could, in theory, have your kitchen parts in hand same-day.

Whereas, we might have only considered Ikea for some handy paper towel hooks and cutlery organizers previously, we ended up buying everything but the countertop and appliances from Ikea.


The best part of doing your kitchen with Ikea’s planner, in my mind, is the fact that you can print out the plan and march into the building inspection office to get your plan approved on your own. My wife did just that without having any building experience. She was back home after an hour, permit approved. I really wish we had done that with the overall job, but instead we payed exorbitant fees for professional drawings. I’ll never make that mistake again.

There’s a ton of work left to do on the house that we don’t know exactly how to fund, yet.

I imagine smart retailers like Ikea are hoping that budget planning software doesn’t evolve fast enough to help people like me realize that my cash is probably better spent on things like dealing with the nails sticking out of my floors before I buy nice new cabinets.