It’s easier than ever to move from one service to another. Blog reader? No problem. Photo site? I have accounts on all of them anyway. Social networks? Yeah I’m signed up on all of them. I use the ones everyone else is using, at the moment. Just like we all do. The rest have a stub profile for me, but don’t see much activity. I started wondering if there was less lock-in than I thought on other services supposedly protected by strong network effects. Like eBay, for instance. They’ve got all the buyers, and all the sellers. But what fraction of their transactions are “Buy it now” from their 700k merchants? Is there an 80/20 rule to those merchants? Could a core be drawn to a new service?

only because people apparently don’t place value in data portability, and like re-entering the same thing. which leads me to believe that most people either prefer things ephemeral or ascribe no value to the implied data.

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