It will be interesting to see how stricter data protection laws play out. The EU will make a new data protection directive in 2012/2013, and other new laws like

It will be interesting to see how stricter data protection laws play out. The EU will make a new data protection directive in 2012/2013, and other new laws like in Singapore or HongKong are more influenced by the EU standard than by US standards - because otherwise they may not get outsourcing work from EU. But I still agree that the facebook data is likely to be very valuable... One of the EU ideas is to give the user a right to "export" their personal data. If there was a functionality where it took you 1 click to recreate all your facebook-data on "SocialNetwork2.0" the switching costs would seem to be very low. I sometimes feel that network advantages are overestimated. Here in Germany we had the facebook clone "StudiVZ" a few years ago, and practically all students were members. Nowadays Facebook dominates here too and many new students don't bother joining "StudiVZ" anymore.