Community, switching costs and identity

Robert Young made a great post as Om Malik's guest blogger yesterday.  However, I wonder what happens to switching costs if and when elements of identity are set free by the next generation of Internet companies?

I think he sums up perfectly why companies like Flickr and Facebook have been so successful in today's web 2.0 environment.    These companies have recognized and respected the importance of user generated content and data, and community.   In his final paragraph, he writes:

As the power shifts increasingly towards community, the corporation loses its grip on the traditional means of control. Yet, by letting go of control, the corporation creates an environment where the community willingly creates its own switching costs.

As he points out, switching costs = competitive advantage.  Two examples he provides are the importance of reputation on EBAY or the power of the social network of My Space.

Yet, there seems to be a growing sense that even elements  of identity properly belong to users.  When I step back to examine my own daily participation on the Internet, it is striking how obvious it is that reputation and social networks should be portable from community to community or service to service.  Why should Amazon own my book review?  (Why should Om's blog host my comment on Robert Young's post?) When it comes to business contacts, we know that the convenience of the Internet for introductions will ultimately, in some form, prevail.  Yet it seems so wrong for LinkedIn to think that it can limit the number of introductions it can make to friends of friends.

This issue is also illustrated by Yahoo!'s minor troubles in convincing some Flickr users to create a Yahoo! account.  Users are  in essence saying: "I don't want you taking any of my identity elements from Flickr and using them for any other purpose."   Yet, this can be so perplexing to a company like Yahoo!, who responds in essence:  "We are not asking for any personal information and in fact we only want to use that information to help you do cool stuff."   What's the problem?  The closer we come to interacting with one company for all elements of our online  identity, the stronger the voice will be that no single company deserves to own those elements.

It is a big issue and one that will consume a lot of thinking from some really smart people in the coming years.  What do we see?  Do we really see a world where we all belong to 3 or 4 incredibly large communities with names like Google or Yahoo!   Will we maintain 3 or 4 buddy lists for Internet chat and the same number of separate ratings as an online commerce participant?  Or do we see a world where social networks and reputations will be portable?  Will we be able to choose to come and go to services that provide things of interest, but  have it within our own discrection to contribute, and extract, elements of our online identity how and when we want? 

I think Robert Young's post is excellent.  But I think companies who read it today, the ones who never realized that communities can create their own switching costs, will stumble even further when they fail to realize that elements of identity should not belong to these communities either.  The Internet is the community.

Comments

[Richard Upton]

In regards to "it seems so wrong for LinkedIn to think that it can limit the number of introductions it can make to friends of friends.", this is one of the reasons I think that LinkedIn is so successful. The majority of professionals are not super-networkers. They don't want to get deluged in emails. The restrictions on introductions means that people who use one of their precious introductions to contact you must mean that there is something special about you that is different from the other more than 3 million people in LinkedIn. If there were no restrictions on LinkedIn, then spammers could just blast introductions to all 3 million people. And then people would leave LinkedIn.

[Dorrian]

I appreciate your point, and LinkedIn is probably not the best example I could have chosen (because like you, I see a lot of value LinkedIn can provide outside of the identity point I was making). I specifically chose the "friends of friends" example (i.e. one degree of separation) because I assume that is an area LinkedIn can't control, even though they seem to be trying to. Users will simply bypass the system to look for an introduction directly.

[Adam Marsh]

Hi Dorrian, I finally read your post -- lots of good points, and a big question we all need to think more about: where does it make sense to draw the line, even in an ideal world, between data that should be owned by the user and data that should be owned by the app? More thoughts here: http://www.econometa.com/archives/24