Warning to Twitter: Openness Key in the Data Economy

By Professor Pinch It's safe to say fellow Minyanville professor Conor Sen and I have been buzzed about the idea of the data economy and what it means to live in a more data-centric world. We hear stories all the time about how much data is out there, how much more data is needed because of how little we know despite the amount of data being generated (see The Future of Consumption and Economic Growth, Part 1), and the big unknown throughout it all is how to make sense of it all. Data is siloed everywhere. From health care to finance to social media and beyond, the data is trapped. And in a day and age when people and companies want to connect with others that are similar or different from themselves, these silos will lead to greater and greater frustration.

(To see Conor Sen's piece on why we'll all be naked with social media, click here.)

I was thinking about this issue because of the acquisition of TweetDeck by Twitter (see Twitter Acquires TweetDeck, but Was Deal Worth It?). Because the thought I have, as well as some other sharp folks like Edward Harrison at Credit Writedowns, is that open architectures are better. At the time, I posited that we were going to have to wait and see if the acquisition was going to be a positive or a negative.

(To see Kevin Depew's article on the five things you need to know - is it merger mania or business as usual? To see the answer, click here.)

But as I started reading this and this courtesy of Harrison, it started to become clear that Twitter's acquisition of TweetDeck could very well be a negative. And that got me thinking of the great failures we had seen in technology from decades past. Like Sony's (SNE) Betamax format for video that got crushed by VHS. Granted nobody cares about either Betamax or VHS anymore, but at the time, Sony's failure to adapt to a more open standard (i.e. VHS) had a serious impact on the company.

(To see James Kostohryz's thoughts on the Chinese housing bubble, click here.)

Of course the other is Apple (AAPL). The first Macintosh was a famously epic fail because the company made the mistake of designing a computer around an operating system that was competing with the Microsoft (MSFT) / Intel (INTC) duopoly. Forget about the fact that the Mac was a better computer; it was proprietary, closed off and nobody was developing applications to run on the platform. And while many folks talk about the juggernaut Apple is today with its iPhone this and iPad that, the application that brought Apple back from the dead was iTunes.

To read the rest, head over to Minyanville.