Ran across the Autonomo.us blog by accident the other day, and now I’m hooked. With network-related services increasingly becoming a significant part of our day-to-day lives, Autonomo.us highlights and advocates for a free/open source approach to both the software and the data side of such interactions.
Of course if you’ve ever tried to get your data out of a popular network service like Facebook, you know what a daunting task that is. Changing that will require a two-prong strategy of developing open data formats for such services while simultaneously offering open source alternatives to these services that can use those open data formats to avoid lock-in and network effects. There’s no reason there couldn’t be a million social networking sites united by a common, open data format and exchange system rather than two or three walled fortresses that hold your data hostage in order to keep you coming back.
Anyway, if that’s the sort of thing that turns you on, check out Autonomo.us