Steve Gillmor’s GestureLab

Something stinks about the AOL firing of its CTO. On its face, it's a simple deal: you snooze you lose. A subordinate screws up, you're both gone. But my gut tells me that AOL is perpetuating the damage, by expressing their inability to process this event in any but a binary you're-gone knee jerk. The data release will probably turn out to be a valuable lesson in the power — and potential misuse — of what eventually will be seen as OUR data.

Meanwhile, it's business as usual for everybody moving forward — including AOL. Just because they've stopped releasing the data doesn't mean they will stop using it for their own purposes. No wonder Eric Schmidt was so adamant about how Google would never allow this to happen — they're a roach motel that counts on that data coming in — and never leaking back out. How they mine that data is their black box, something that they will protect even from the government, not necessarily because of the user's data civil rights, but certainly because of Google's protection of its algorthyms.

Follow the money — said Deep Throat. So if AOL is moving from a dial-up subscription model to a "free" model, then they are moving toward the very m.o. that the CTO got shitcanned for. In other words, she really got fired for exposing the value of data mining to the "free" economy. If this is the new model, then it was particularly bad timing to illustrate for nervous users just what they were paying for "free" apps and services.

Better to cut the meme off before users thought too much about what was being exposed. I wonder what data is being revealed today on AOL's site, and Microsoft Live, and Yahoo, and Google/MySpaces/etc. All that same data, all those revealing queries for how to do illegal stuff, and what we want to know, and who we are looking for, and what times we do that, and what we do next, and what we did just before. You know, the stuff that these engines slice and dice to understand who we are and what we want.

Of course, all that stopped when AOL put the cat back in the bag, and when they fired the CTO we all knew it was just a bad dream. God forbid the inmates had access to this data; let's get it back in the hands of the professionals. Move along — nothing to see here.

Luckily, all that is a big pile of shit, served lukewarm so as not to jump out from the rest of the gruel. And luckily again, that we are slowly but surely learning how to detect flaws in the architecture of participation that is sold to us as freedom in the new Web 2.0h. User generated content, move over. It's user generated behavior that is being sold down the river for 2 tickets to the Mets game and a Gmail client. What we need is a little cash register ka-ching sound layered into every click, to remind us that we could use a little piece of that. 

Monday, August 21st, 2006 at 11:50 pm.
Filed under Uncategorized.
Subscribe to RSS 2.0.
Leave a comment or trackback.