Data Portability
Standards-related project.
URL = http://www.dataportability.org/
Description
"As users, our identity, photos, videos and other forms of personal data should be discoverable by, and shared between our chosen tools or vendors. We need a DHCP for Identity. A distributed File System for data. The technologies already exist, we simply need a complete reference design to put the pieces together.
Our mission is too put all existing technologies and initiatives in context to create a reference design for end-to-end Data Portability. To promote that design to the developer, vendor and end-user community." (http://www.dataportability.org/)
Discussion
Difficulties in implementation:
Juan Carlos Perez:
"Vendor Interest Minimal
Unfortunately, the enthusiasm, commitment and passion displayed by participants, many of whom are acting as individual volunteers, hasn't so far been replicated by the major Internet players.
While the decisions by Google and Facebook to become members put the workgroup in a news spotlight, their representatives don't seem to have yet participated in the forum discussions. Google and Facebook also declined to have their workgroup representatives be interviewed for this article. Each separately sent a brief, prepared statement saying that they want to participate in the group because they're committed to data portability.
This isn't new. The CEOs of both companies at different times have said that their companies believe in data portability, and yet, neither them nor any other major Internet company can be said to have taken a leadership role in this effort.
"I haven't seen anything convincing from the big Internet companies that illustrates that they want to embrace this wholeheartedly," Breslin said. "These sites haven't really been rushing to make their data portable yet."
"We are yet to see if they are fully committed. So far they have only committed to the conversation," said Saad, who is also CEO of Faraday Media in Australia and cofounder of the APML Workgroup. "That being said, however, it's encouraging to see them take the first few steps in the right direction,"
This isn't a minor point. The DataPortability Workgroup and the other technical organizations could come up with fantastic solutions, but if the major Internet players -- and in particular the major social-networking sites -- don't adopt them, data portability will not become a reality for end-users. MySpace, Friendster, LinkedIn and Bebo did not reply to requests for comment for this story. Portable or Piracy?
Maybe these Internet companies aren't truly convinced that data portability will be good for their businesses. In what some viewed as an example of words being inconsistent with actions, Facebook recently booted from its social network the well-known technology blogger Robert Scoble.
Scoble's crime? He exported his contacts data in his Facebook account over to Plaxo's address book management service, Pulse. No can do, Facebook said, explaining that Plaxo's tool violated Facebook's terms of service and posed a security risk because it "scraped" the data from the social network. Scoble's account was later reinstated, but under the condition he doesn't do this again.
If you operate a social-networking site -- or any site where people create an account or profile, list contacts and post content -- a way to discourage them from switching to a competitor is to make it hard or impossible for them to easily export and reuse that data elsewhere.
Yet, proponents of data portability like Saad say that things are starting to change, and that Facebook, MySpace, Google and others need to wise up if they don't want to fall into disfavor with their users.
What has changed is that these "social" sites have reached mainstream status, and a critical mass of users have realized the inconvenience of having to reenter and update a lot of the same information and content in multiple "social" sites and applications.
"As more and more applications start to feel the impact of social features, users will begin to demand a data portability solution. Either that or network fatigue will reduce adoption and eventually kill the fun," Saad said.
For example, a concrete result of data portability could be a console-like management application where a person could manage his address book contacts, photos, videos, social news entries, social bookmarks and blog posts. With that application, the user would be able to share data between multiple social applications, sites and services.
Unlike other vendors, Plaxo is heavily involved in data portability discussions and efforts, precisely because its Pulse service has been designed to help people manage their dispersed contacts data across address books, sites and e-mail accounts.
"By making data portable, you're enabling all these tools to work together. The user can be the hub and the different services can be spokes. That's what we're pushing for: users in control of the data and interoperability among the services," said Joseph Smarr, Plaxo's chief platform architect." (http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/141541/data_portability_reasonable_goal_or_impossible_dream.html)
More Information
- Watch: Robert Scoble on Data Portability
- See the wiki of The DataPortability Project