I’ve recently voiced my opinion that bigcos and some of the essential components of Web 2.0, especially mashups and sharing (all kinds of sharing) simply don’t mix. With the recent news of Amazon suing Statsaholic, the poor little mashup that simply took Alexa’s (largely useless) data and made it better looking - and after they’ve done everything in their power to shut down the service - this seems even more obvious.

Mashable calls for a petition against the lawsuit. TechFold calls for a boycott of Amazon/Alexa’s services. I’m not big on petitions or boycotts, but feel free to join in if you think it’ll help. However, the point I’ve made about the very nature of big companies and Web 2.0 seems even more obvious now.

Web 2.0 is about sharing. Big business is about money. How do you force the bigcos of the world, who are buying web startups left and right, not to try to capitalize on sharing, and not to try to shut down mashups?

Not being an expert on law, I won’t go into possible legislative action to protect the mashup-based companies. But I can do common sense, and it spells like this.

Sharing works both ways. If you share your data on the internet, especially via a public API, you don’t get to complain about companies actually using that data. Case closed. If you don’t like that, then put your data behind a password. It’s simple and easy, and works perfectly. What, you’ll lose 90% of your users in the process? Tough luck. You can’t share and not share at the same time.

I just hope the judges around the world will realize this.

This entry was posted on Friday, April 20th, 2007 at 4:13 am and is filed under Web, Web 2.0, Features, News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.