Tim, the Inventor of the World Wide Web, Criticizes Facebook’s Data Policies

Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, expressed his views in a website the Scientific American journal, in a post entitled ‘Long Live the Web: A Call for Continued Open Standards and Neutrality,’ has condemned today’s successful social networking websites, specifically giving a reference to Facebook as well, for limiting the ‘openness’ of today’s web. He laid emphasis on reminding that “The web evolved into a powerful, ubiquitous tool because it was built on egalitarian principles and because thousands of individuals, universities and companies have worked, both independently and together as part of the World Wide Web Consortium, to expand its capabilities based on those principles.”

Tim Berners-Lee

Having said that, he went onto criticize the web’s democratic nature of today, has he implied it was being threatened by few of its “most successful inhabitants” than others. He then pointed his figures particularly on the situation of Facebook, LinkedIn and Friendster, as they are limiting the amount of data flow freely available across the web, which according to him, is not at all leading to healthy tomorrow. His write was tailored in this manner: "Facebook, LinkedIn, Friendster and others typically provide value by capturing information as you enter it: your birthday, your e-mail address, your likes, and links indicating who is friends with whom and who is in which photograph.”

And the criticism went literally later when he alleged that "These sites assemble these bits of data into brilliant databases and reuse the information to provide value-added service—but only within their sites. Once you enter your data into one of these services, you cannot easily use them on another site. Each site is a silo, walled off from the others. Yes, your site’s pages are on the web, but your data are not. You can access a web page about a list of people you have created in one site, but you cannot send that list, or items from it, to another site."

Facebook is now being kept under growing pressure to open up the access to its social graph for other companies as well, which is perhaps their most dominant asset. Whereas, Mark Zuckerberg, the co-founder and mastermind behind the largest social network today, is constantly defending against these calls at the Web 2.0 Summit, where he boldly and straight forwardly refused to give any particular date when Facebook would likely open up its data set to the rest of the web, or whether it would even do that or not.