Everywhere and nowhere

The following is my comment submitted to the Economist.com regarding their article Everywhere and nowhere published March 19, 2008.

The premise of the article is that "[s]ocial networking will become a ubiquitous feature of online life [but t]hat does not mean it is a business".

"Online companies like Facebook and MySpace employ solutions to disclose how they handle people's information. However, little direct, on-demand control is provided to the actual owners of the information. This is the niche in which these online companies can truly provide a service for which people and businesses are willing to pay.

People want to share their entire personal health records with a personal physician but only share precise, granular parts of it with an impersonal insurance company. But ‘fear factors’ are still keeping people from becoming comfortable with posting their personal health information into online accounts.

In an age when international product supply chains are providing dangerous toys and potential ‘mad cow’ meat products to unsuspecting consumers, the manufacturers of safe products want to differentiate themselves from the manufacturers of unsafe products. But, again, fear factors keep the good manufacturers from posting information online that may put them at a competitive disadvantage to downstream competitors.

The business opportunity is for the Facebooks and the MySpaces of the world to provide their users with data ownership’controls for granularly monitoring and tracking the use of their information as it is shared one-step, two-steps, three-steps, etc., down a business supply chain, or likewise within a network of strangers."