TightWind is written by Kyle Baxter. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

The New Yorker has a fantastic profile of Mark Zuckerberg. One section briefly detailed how he sees Facebook developing:

Zuckerberg imagines Facebook as, eventually, a layer underneath almost every electronic device. You’ll turn on your TV, and you’ll see that fourteen of your Facebook friends are watching “Entourage,” and that your parents taped “60 Minutes” for you. You’ll buy a brand-new phone, and you’ll just enter your credentials. All your friends—and perhaps directions to all the places you and they have visited recently—will be right there.

In other words, he wants Facebook to become the depository for everyone’s personal data—interests, favorite music, movies and books, where you are (and where you’ve been), what you’ve watched, what restaurants you like,… and anything else of interest.

So, Facebook very much wants people to live “open” lives, or to document their every move and whim, because it is necessary for their strategy. That’s troubling, but if people want to, then it’s their choice. I don’t think it’s a particularly good thing, but people can share as much as they please.

If we set aside that concern, what’s also troubling is that Facebook wants to be the place to store all of this information. Interests, location, food tastes, shows you are watching—they want to control every single bit of information about people. If we do want to share this information, why shouldn’t we have a multitude of services, one for each kind of information and specialized for it? They can be connected together by open data standards, so there’s no real benefit in storing it all in one service.

There’s a huge lock-in that Facebook is trying to create. If they become the depository for all of this information, and there’s no good way to export our data from their service, then in essence they control our online social network and identity. That’s powerful.