One of the themes of Web 2.0 (if there is such a thing) is that all of the data that gets aggregated by Web applications and social networks can be a very powerful thing, and can in some cases justify giving services away for free — provided people who use those services agree to let their data be sliced and diced and parsed in various ways, whether to generate ads or whatever. <\/p>\n
In this way, data becomes “the new Intel inside,” as Tim O’Reilly has said<\/a> (and Paul Kedrosky has echoed in a number of posts).<\/p>\n With that in mind, I thought it was interesting to read Jim Buckmaster’s response to a question along those lines that was submitted to the Freakonomics guys as part of their recent Q&A<\/a> with the reluctant businessmen who run Craigslist. I found it admirable in a way that when they were asked what they planned to do with all that data from billions of online listings, Jim said:<\/p>\n “It sounds old-fashioned, but we generally don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t view information submitted by our users as data to be used for other purposes.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n About as old-fashioned as saying you don’t really want to monetize those eight billion pageviews you get every month, I suppose. You have to hand it to Jim and Craig — they may be passing up billions of dollars in IPO money or acquisition leverager, but they stick to their principles. My friend Leigh has some thoughts<\/a> about the whole “I own your data” approach to Web services too.<\/p>\n