Social media bill of rights

At Office 2.0 yesterday I heard about this significant announcement: A Bill of Rights for users of the Social Web put out by four Web 2.0 pioneers: Marc Canter (who co-founded Ourmedia with me); uber-blogger Robert Scoble; Joseph Marc, the head tech guy at social
networking company Plaxo; and TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington.

It’s short and sweet:

We publicly assert that all users of the social web are entitled to certain fundamental rights, specifically:

• Ownership of their own personal information, including:
  • their own profile data
  • the list of people they are connected to
  • the activity stream of content they create;
• Control of whether and how such personal information is shared with others; and
• Freedom to grant persistent access to their personal information to trusted external sites.

Sites supporting these rights shall:

• Allow their users to syndicate their own profile data, their
  friends list, and the data that’s shared with them via the service,
  using a persistent URL or API token and open data formats;
• Allow their users to syndicate their own stream of activity outside the site;
• Allow their users to link from their profile pages to external identifiers in a public way; and
• Allow their users to discover who else they know is also on their
  site, using the same external identifiers made available for lookup
  within the service.

These are familiar principles, and a well-trod rallying cry, for many of us in the social media movement. It’s good to see it laid out this plainly.

Now we have to pressure companies to live up to these common-sense standards.

80 comments on the Open Social Web site. More from Marc, Scoble, Smarr and  LwEES.

JD Lasica, founder of Inside Social Media, is also a fiction author and the co-founder of the cruise discovery engine Cruiseable. See his About page, contact JD or follow him on Twitter.