I just tweeted a quick warning about what @davewiner calls the “Corporate silo”.  The reference is to how companies invite us to ”let them host” or provide , often through some plugin,  some “community” function.  What I have in mind here is the release this week of the Facebook comment box plugin,  which they offer to website owners as a “solution” to the “problem” of deriving measurements ad impact from the interactions of their communities.

Make no mistake,  Facebook does a lot of things very well.  They deserve,  to some extent,  the mantle of expert at social and they are eating just about everybody else’s lunch on this one,  including Google,  and Apple. 

But here’s the problem I see,  highlighted by this new plugin.  Facebook is wanting to leverage outside sites’ community data and interests in the same way they did with “Like”.  But when people hand this over to Facebook,  they are “farming out” the handling and leverage of their own communities’ data to the extent that Facebook “allows” us to “recover it” via API,  which is totally up to them as to what data they’ll “allow” us to retrieve.

This all stems from the failure of the church and it’s communication structures to adequately discern that we have a distinct community with particular interests and issues we consider to be paramount.  Facebook ingeniously figure out a public sphere that they have data-cized into a “Social Graph”.  But there are layers;  “related” tables hanging off of our user information that link us to particular people (and via that,  groups)  based on common “likes” and common “friends”.  But Facebook cannot get us all the way there.  They are not a theological company.  Only we can move beyond the “water cooler” talk,  or delve into “Graph-ing” the social ties between theological “likes” and “friends”.  We have to look at this highly effective and popular “social network” based on the secular/popular sphere,  and build out an accurate representation and “relational” data that will tap the theological connections that we are yet to discover.

Back to the “silo”.  I won’t incorporate Facebook comments yet because I did not receive a convincing answer to why they don’t REALLY let us “integrate” the comment box into our own comment system.  It’sall based on feeding it INTO Facebook.  on “pouring it  all into the Silo” they have built.  THEN,  they will “allow” us to retrieve it via API.  But why not at the outset?  MY current comments system,  Intense Debate,  stores a copy of the comments in my WP comments table, as well as what it takes over into the Intense Debate system,  so I am not abandoned should that Comment system go offline.  But Facebook is saying right now that one can “fetch the comments” from their API,  but one would have to depend  on what metadata they make available to that API,  not to mention that people will just go with the plugin and send all of their comment data off  site.  That’s a little bit risky to me,  especially since I anticipate being able to go and add some WP data calls to do various things that might not be available via existing plugins,  and to add relational tables and data that non-theological folks would not be thinking about.

I hear very few people who are cognizant of the danger of “Silo’d data”,  and understand the options that may be removed for data manipulation.  I seriously doubt that Facebook will provide much flexibility when it comes to manipulating data for use with theological communities that go beyond a rudimentary “religious topics” data organization,  if even that.  Why would they,  or ,  how “could” they?