Social Graphs, Data Portability and Monetization

Andrew Chen writes a thought provoking blog post about portability of social graphs and data in a social networking context at Inside Facebook:

“ * One potential issue that makes social networks resist data portability is the monetizability of the data
* Not all user data is created equal, there’s interest versus intent
* Social networks generally produce lots of low-value interest data, which has weak ROI attached to it
* Search engines, review sites, comparison shopping, etc all produce high-value intent data
* Even if you have the data, you have to worry about whether or not you have enough of it to matter - although ad networks and exchanges have started to alleviate that”