Myspace and Facebook make Data Portability moves - lots more work to be done

[Chris Saad]

From my personal blog:
http://chrissaad.wordpress.com/2008/05/09/myspace-and-facebook-make-data-portability-moves-lots-more-work-to-be-done/

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In the last couple of days data portability and the DataPortability
project have been all over the headlines. That’s always a good thing
for the cause of open standards and interoperability.

Each announcement has been a small and long-overdue step towards
making social network profile data available to other sites in some
sort of digestible way.

First, MySpace announced their ‘Data Availability’ push with a series
of launch partners, and then, seemingly in response, Facebook
announced ‘Facebook Connect’ which is an iteration on their existing
APIs to allow 3rd parties to connect and access their user data.

Both moves have rightly been attributed as ‘Data Portability’ plays -
but neither of them are true ‘DataPortability’ implementations… yet.

They are each proposing and implementing their own specific
mechanisms, policies and technologies for moving the data around, and
none of them are allowing true two way sync.

Over the coming months it will be our job, at the DataPortability
project, to further refine and ratify the DataPortability Best
Practices (http://wiki.dataportability.org/display/dpmain/Technical)
to provide a complete, end-to-end guide that Facebook, Myspace and
others can follow. Once properly implemented, all applications on the
web will essentially become part of a friction free inter-operable and
two way data layer based on open standards.

It will be up to bloggers and other media outlets to keep the pressure
on these players to continue to improve their offerings to achieve
true compliance based on community recommendations made through the
DataPortability project.

I look forward to the journey and further discussing these issues at
the Internet Identity Workshop on Monday May 12 and the 2nd Data
Sharing Summit on Thursday May 15.

Chris