I have been thinking about this for awhile and during a little run this morning I reached the conclusion that, like information before it, user generated content wants to be free on the Internet. Not free as does not cost you anything. Free to move. From one social network or communication media to another unbounded.

When reading through my feeds shortly after I ran across the Marc Cantor’s Bill of Rights for Users of the Social Web. It reads in part:

“We publicly assert that all users of the social web are entitled to certain fundamental rights, specifically:

* Ownership of their own personal information, including:
o their own profile data
o the list of people they are connected to
o the activity stream of content they create;
* Control of whether and how such personal information is shared with others; and
* Freedom to grant persistent access to their personal information to trusted external sites.”

The idea seems to have some pretty important folks behind it.

All I know is that I want to be able to consume the information generated on all my different networks and communication vehicles in one place. I hope a never get another forward from LinkedIn for the rest of my life. I don’t want to read FaceBook friends updates on Facebook, I want them to extended to twitter. I don’t want to communicate via Facebook mail (and refuse to do so). I want good ‘ol POP.

MySpace is dead (they just don’t know it) because they refused to open up their platform. Facebook gained a great deal of developer attention when they opened up their APIs. Facebook could be dead is they do not extend beyond their current stance. If nothing else AOL should have taught us that holding people hostage to things have an address book is a losing strategy.

There is a real opportunity for the company that gets it right and enables me to use my data on my terms. A real big opportunity that is gaining steam.