Ten years ago, most of what we were interested in was on the open web. It was at the other end of a URL. Even if it was on a private website, you could scrape it - and you could worry later about whether you were violating the terms of service.

That's not the world we live in now. Stuff is inside apps - it's not scrapable. The interesting behaviors happened on Facebook and Twitter. So establishing long-term relationship between those who want to dispassionately study those behaviors and the private entities that have all the data is a huge imperative for me.

It requires walking through a minefield. On the one hand, if all you're doing is calling out the companies - well, it's their data, and they're not going to want to share it with you. On the other hand, if you get too close to them then you get the data but you don't always go where it follows.