Tom Guarriello examines what happens to your online relationships if a platform disappears or removes you. He has 1,538 YouTube subscribers he could lose overnight, and points to Robert Scoble's Facebook ban as a warning about who actually owns your social graph. The fix: collect real email addresses and build connections across multiple platforms so your network survives anywhere.
Oh, hi, it's Tom Guarriello. You know, according to my channel page, I've got 1,538 subscribers on YouTube. Now, if tomorrow I did something stupid and I got thrown off YouTube, what would happen to the relationships that I have with those people. Now, I've probably had contact with maybe 50 of my subscribers off YouTube, uh, but the others, many, many others, we've had lots and lots of communication here. But if I wasn't allowed back on YouTube, and if I wasn't allowed to get back and access my subscriber list and be able to communicate with you via YouTube's direct message system, we might never be able to connect again. We might never be able to communicate with one another again. And that's the, that's really at the heart of this problem that's come up this week on the internet in regard to Robert Scoble and Facebook. Now, I don't know if you know anything about this, but Robert Scoble is a famous blogger and online video producer, and Scoble this week got temporarily thrown off Facebook for scraping identity data from his 5,000 or so Facebook friends. You know, Facebook friends, whatever you want to call those people. They're friends in Facebook. Now, what Scoble says is that he was just trying to take his data, which is his data, he believes, because they're his friends, and take that data somewhere else. You know, I'm not only care about whether or not what Scoble was doing was— of course it violates the Facebook terms of service, right? But I don't care if what he was doing was, you know, proper or improper. Doesn't matter to me. What matters to me is that if I got thrown off here, my 1,538 subscribers and I wouldn't really be able to connect anymore. Here today, gone tomorrow, you know, and Furthermore, if you think about it, if I wanted to communicate with you in another way, if I wanted to send you an email, if you decided to tell me what your real email address is, if I said to you now, "I want all my subscribers to send me your real email address through private messages so that we could communicate outside of YouTube if we decided to," that would be the only way that we could guarantee that we would actually be able to maintain a relationship if you YouTube decided that it wanted to throw me out of here for some reason. Now, this is going to be a big issue this year, the issue of data portability. Who owns my data, my friends? Are they my friends? Are they YouTube's friends or are they Facebook's friends or are they, you know, pick your social network. So the question really is who owns that data? Who owns that? And even more important, who owns the relationships? How do we be, how can we be assured that we can maintain the kinds of relationships that many of us have worked hard to establish here and really enjoy having relationships with one another. How can we maintain those relationships and take those relationships no matter where we go? Which of the many social networks that you're in would you like to be able to have all of your YouTube connections in? Recently I've been spending a good deal of time on Twitter, uh, link up here, and have been able to connect with a lot of YouTube people on Twitter. So now we're beginning to find ourselves kind of like a a roving caravan, a roving tribe of people who met in one world, one social network world, and are now moving into others. I think it'd be great if I could take that list of 1,538 people, all of whom, any of whom wanted to be on a list where we could move around together and stay in touch with one another. So keep your eyes open. This is gonna be a big deal over the next couple of months, I think. Data portability for those of us in social networks who might want to be able to actually maintain our relationships if we decide to go elsewhere. So take care, see you guys soon. Bye-bye.
