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Data Portability for your Social Media Profiles

Jan 29, 2008
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Robert Scobles ban from Facebook early this month brought up the discussion again about ownership of user data in social networks such as MySpace, Facebook and others, as well as about data portability.

Robert Scoble did violate the terms of service agreement with Facebook; so much seems to be clear. What his actual motivations were for his actions are not so clear though. You can check out his version of the story at Computerworld and also 1938 Media’s Loren Feldman’s takes one and two on this incident as well.

It does not matter what the actual reasons were and what exactly happened, but one thing is clear, it brought attention to an issue that everybody who uses social networking sites is just all very familiar with. I for myself consider it a pain to rebuild profiles and connections from scratch at every social media site again and again. It takes time and as most others, is time the only commodity I have always a shortage of. Then I look at my profiles at the different sites and how they developed over time to realize that they are all looking pretty much the same, I even hooked up with the same people at all those different sites again.

There got to be a better way of doing this.

I am not the only one who had this thought cross his mind. Some took even action towards a solution to the problem. The recent Scoble affair brought a promising initiative that is working on a solution into the spotlight, which was certainly welcomed by the active members of the initiative.

Hello DataPortability.org
It is actually looking very promising that this initiative will result into a standard that will be adopted by many social media sites. They are not going to reinvent the wheel and start creating something from scratch, but use and “mash-up” existing standards and initiative to create something new specifically aimed to solve the data portability problem.

To make something like this work, it is imperative that major players in that area are supporting it. Plaxo, Facebook and Google were already on board a few weeks ago and Microsoft followed just a few days ago. All of those parties are more or less rivals and/or to some extend competitors. Getting them together to honestly find a solution that will work for all parties is a step into the right direction.

If those four alone would implement the standard, chances are good that many others will follow. The standard is not defined yet; work groups are currently formed to tackle the various things that need to be taken care of in a project like this. I am sure that we will see additional players join the collaboration in the coming weeks and months.

Trip Foster over at RelevantlySpeaking.com was pointing out the problem that user data are actually the reason that makes social media sites valuable. Google did not spend a couple billion Dollars on YouTube because of their technological platform, but for the large amount of people who use the site. An open standard that allows people to take their stuff and easily copy or move it to somewhere else is a potential threat for social networks. People will be less inclined to get up and leave for a competitors site, if switching is as easy as switching your local phone provider.

The acquired user data are what makes Facebook and MySpace so valuable and Gold for marketers who will be enabled to tap into this kind of data to create highly targeted marketing and advertising campaigns. For this reason did the announcement of Facebook and others networks to support this standard surprise me a little bit.

It will be interesting to see how this one moves forward. To learn more about this initiative, check out their official website at DataPortability.org.

Also check out the audio interview with Chris Saad, who started the project by Miriam Godau from Communipedia.de. The MP3 audio recording is in English, even if the short announcement blog post is in German.

They also created a nice little video to illustrate the problem and how they are planning to solve it.

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About Carsten Cumbrowski

Internet Marketer, Entrepreneur and Blogger. To learn more about me and what I am doing, visit my website and check out the “about” section.

Twitter: ccumbrowski
Filed under: Social Media + Social Networks & Networking