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Ask HN:What are your thoughts on an open database for social data?

by xeodox on 8/10/10, 6:46 AM with 1 comments

An open database where companies can POST any sort of structured data (social data), and other companies can QUERY this data.

Right now, social data is scattered around. Your tweets, check-ins, reviews, wall-posts are on different services. Imagine if they were centralized, and the application AND the user could control who gets to query this data.

Applications can query on the user, query on the venue, query on anything--in a very structured way--and the database would return the results.

Of course, the applications who post the data would get something in return--whether it's money, users, or whatever value.

Is there a market for this "open database?" Will this idea work?

Please let me know your thoughts on the opportunity and value of this idea!

  • by RiderOfGiraffes on 8/10/10, 8:55 AM

    Suppose I want to POST something. Do you do any checks of the veracity? Do you check for obscenity? Do you check for insults to deities from minor religions? Do you check for copyright infringements? Do you check for invasions of privacy?

    I'd be interested to see how you think this can work, and the controls you would propose.