Building Blocks of the Web 2.0 Attention Economies (Google & Facebook)

• identities (Google - proprietary, Facebook - proprietary)
• content addressing (Google - open, Facebook - closed)
• content hosting (Google - open (the web), Facebook - proprietary)
• attention transactions history (Google - proprietary, Facebook - proprietary)
• content filtering heuristics (Google - proprietary, Facebook - proprietary)
• interfaces (Google - proprietary, Facebook - proprietary)
• attention <-> capital exchanges / ad platforms (Google - closed, Facebook-closed)

These platforms can extract huge amount of value by having a prioprietary access to the low-level attention transaction history created by users.

Users who provide this data can’t take their data with them and feed it into new applications. This creates monopolies and huge competitive advantages. With the advent of AI and machine learning, companies like Google/Facebook who have sole access to these data sets can get even more advantage.