Google, Facebook, and Data Portability
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Written By Sepideh Saremi | January 9, 2008 | Share This
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Representatives from Google, Facebook, and social address book Plaxo yesterday joined the Data Portability Workgroup (DPW), an organization whose mission is “to put all existing technologies and initiatives in context to create a reference design for end-to-end Data Portability.”
In short, the DPW wants to create standards so Internet users will be able to take their data across any site, social network, or other application - i.e., to free each user’s social graph. Though Google and Plaxo are both part of the OpenSocial initiative to create standards for widget development and so it’s not a big surprise they’d join DPW, it’s significant that Facebook is involved. No social network truly wants its users to be able to move their data from that network to another; their models are mostly built on locking users into their sites, and the value of these sites is in the users and those users’ connections to each other. Right now, everything but that social graph can be very easily recreated by a kid in a dorm room (and let’s not forget that’s where Facebook got its start). This is why blogger Robert Scoble was briefly booted from Facebook last week for using a Plaxo scraper to export his friends’ data.
But because of what’s at stake, Facebook is wise to take part in the conversation about the social graph and thus help shape what happens with it, as Charlene Li explains:
And that’s the reason why I think Facebook has joined the Data Portability Workgroup. By joining the workgroup, they haven’t committed themselves to opening up their social graph. I admit, this is a potentially a pipe dream because anyone who is in the position of power — like MySpace, Facebook, or LinkedIn — have little incentive to open up their social graph vaults for start-ups to exploit. But Facebook et. al. are smart, and know that unless they participate, they can’t influence the outcome to of the open social graph to their benefit.
Li also rightfully points out that an open social web comes with potentially thorny implications for privacy. And Ernst-Jan Pfauth at The Next Web wrote a great post about explaining Data Portability to average users.
Still, there are a few points to hammer out for that user in defining user rights, one being the question of data ownership itself. After all, its arguable that the only data that truly “belongs” to any user on a social network is the data about that user, entered by that user - and not necessarily all the data entered by the user’s friends. The Data Portability Workgroup will likely need to address this when the technological standards are decided upon.
Topics: Facebook, Google, Social Media, Technology |