Data Portability Red Herrings
I think what’s interesting about the whole scoble facebook, plaxo issue is that it shows how much of a red herring the idea of data portability is when applied to the social graph. Of course you want to be able to take your data and move it to another provider, but when ‘your’ data intercepts with mine, there are pretty significant privacy hurdles that arise. The whole thing gets complex and falls in a heap. I pretty much agree with Loren Feldman; for any friends on Facebook that I’ve made by letting them scan my email contacts, I still have all of that data and don’t need to run a screen scraper to get it. For any other friends, Facebook provides that to me as part of their service. I can access it freely when I need to, but I can’t export it wholesale. For me, that’s a completely acceptable trade-off.
Also, honestly, signing on to the idea of data portability once you’ve been nabbed is a little disingenuous. Substitute Scoble in this scenario with someone who’s just adding Facebook friends in order to put together a huge list of email addresses. That’s not ‘data portability’; it’s spam.
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I think I’m in general agreement with you here, but I would like to see some of these standards, and general thinking around this area continue (although many of the standards on that site I know little about to be honest).
Dopplr has done some great things around data portability, allowing you to use your Flickr, Twitter and Facebook friends lists as a means of finding the same friends on their network, and some of the standards (microformats for example) are great for opening up these sort of possibilities. I would like to see social networking companies open up more, and no OpenSocial doesn’t cut it (great - now I get zombies biting me on *every* social network I join!)
The fact that Plaxo is behind this is worrying also, yet not surprising. It seems as if they are up to their same old tricks. As to Scoble, he really is becoming Silicon Valley’s version of Paris Hilton isn’t he!
Finally, say what you want about Data Portability, but that website is just an absolute beauty isn’t it!?
Yep, generally speaking I think the data portability movement is a great idea, and I’m sure some useful things will be born from it as it grows; right now though the context is key, and the more intertwingled your data is with mine, the messier things get.
And, yes, they have a really nicely designed site.
Scratch that, they just replaced it with something quite bland