My Place in the Crowd

Time will tell, but it appears that Yahoo! has made it *really* easy (for application developers) to extract publicly available data from all over the interwebs and query it through Yahoo!’s servers.

YQL Execute allows you to build tables of data from other sources online, using Javascript as a programming language and run it on Yahoo’s servers, so the infrastructure needs are very small.

Similarly, Google “just launched a new search feature that makes it easy (for you and I) to find and compare public data.”

Image taken from the Google Blog.

Which is pretty exciting as both are huge leaps towards what we’ve envisioned as a “datatrust” in various blog posts and our white paper. Well except for maybe the “trust” part. (Especially given our experiences with Yahoo here and here.)

A few more points to contemplate:

1. Now that the Promised Land of collating all the world’s data approaches on the horizon, will that change people’s willingness to make data publicly accessible? What I share on my personal website might not be okay rearing its head in new contexts I never intended. As we’ve said elsewhere, when talking about privacy, context is everything.
2. What about ownership? Both Yahoo! and Google may only temporarily cache the data insofar as is needed to serve it up. But, in effect, they will become the gatekeepers to all of our public data, data you and I contribute to. So the question remains, What about ownership?
3. There’s still a lot of data that’s *not* publicly accessible. Possibly some of the most interesting and accurate data out there. How will we get at that? Case in point, Facebook just shut down a new app that allows you to extract your personal “Facebook Newsfeed” and make it public via an RSS feed, citing, what else? Privacy concerns. (Not to mention the fact that access to Facebook data is generally hamstrung by privacy.)