When your information does not belong to you anymore

Salesforce is now using the information in the cloud and allowing companies to setup searches to monitor contact graph and Twitter.

It seems everyone is trying to get on the cloud wagon. Google now is searching Twitter and Facebook as real time as they can (so is Bing). Facebook is trying to expose as much data as you would let them by making public the default. I suppose in the latter case they are preparing themselves for making money.

It makes complete sense to try to harness so much information into something which will will give a competitive advantage. I cannot help but think about some colossal implications.

• If you had to be careful about what you said about your company before, once they can have such targeted searches which can be narrowed down to only your employees. Seems you’d better stay off any comments positive or negative. Even if you have positive messages but they are not in-line with your company’s marketing message, this is still not very good.
• Once company understand the source of the information, it will not take much for them to manipulate that information. and then the information will not be very reliable anymore. But it will be a bit like Wikipedia, there is mostly good information but you cannot really take it at face value.
• There is a huge opportunity here for some very interesting visualization multi-dimensional with evolution over time. That would be such an interesting project to work on.
• I suppose it also becomes a tool for you to become an ‘expert’ in your field. No need for hosting conferences anymore, just have lots of opinions and you will come up a lot from the searches in your chosen field. Mind you, it is more likely you will be drowned in by the volume of the crowd.
• I suppose this brings the next thought which is: ‘is there any need for experts?’ When you have access to all the information of your industry at your fingertip, do you have any need for an expert any more. Maybe the only expert we will ever need will be data mining experts and data visualization experts.
• I suppose their is no need here to go on discussing the validity of the wisdom of crowds vs expert opinion and quality vs popularity.