Is value in the Data?
O’Reilly made it clear when he “invented” the concept of Web 2.0 : he thought that the value was in the data collected by website and web-services. There is not a single day where I can’t see Data-Portability within my twitter feed, or within a source I’m following with Notifixio.us. The concept behind it is that the User Generated Data/Content actually belongs to the users themselves and not to the platform they’ve been uploaded to. The consequence is services like Friendfeed are “pulling” the valuable data from the platform they’ve been originally put to. Despite the bad consequence discussed by Fred Wilson, it also brings the question of whether the value is still in the data?
My answer to this is clearly no! Even though having tons of videos helps generating ad revenues, my bet is that sooner or later, the “best” content-generating the most page views- is slightly being “pulled” away from Youtube and scattered into hundred of aggregators, or widgets.
For me, the “value” is in the ability to “transform” the data, extract the “collective intelligence” and give/sell it back to the users. In that approach, I think that services like FuelFrog, or Wesabe can prove to be very valuable in the near future. In these services, the value of the data is actually worthless and not even generating any page views (who cares that I spent $60 in gas at the Texaco on Lombard Street?), but the gathering of thousands of similar information can maybe help build a realtime database of the cheapest gas station around me, or help understand which vehicles have the highest MPG in the Bay Area : this is of course great value!
While building Notifixio.us, I am very much concentrating on this : extracting “intelligence” from the data we’re gathering to return it to the user and build a strong and long-term competitive advantage!
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