Breaking: Facebook, Plaxo, and Google Endorse Data Portability

A few days ago I wrote about the data portability debate sparked by the deactivation of Robert Scoble’s Facebook account following his attempt to siphon his social graph data out of that service. Well, now Duncan Riley at TechCrunch and Steve O’Hear at ZDNet are breaking the news that Facebook (along with Google and Plaxo) have joined the DataPortability Workgroup. Riley reports:

The DataPortability Workgroup is actively working to create the ‘DataPortability Reference Design’ to document the best practices for integrating existing open standards and protocols for maximum interoperability (and here’s the key area) to allow users to access their friends and media across all the applications, social networking sites and widgets that implement the design into their systems.

Riley congratulates Google and Facebook, but O’Hear is less optimistic:

Call me cynical, but while I welcome this move [...], I remain skeptical of how quickly users will actually see real-world benefits from Google and Facebook’s membership.

Whether there will be an immediate change in the services or not, this is a big step towards unlocking the social graph.

If you enjoyed this post, you might also like:

- "Scaled Automation: Google and Facebook Start To Connect Your Dots", posted by Jarred on May 12, 2008

- "Facebook Chat: Social Networking Comes Home", posted by Jarred on April 15, 2008

- "Mea Culpa: Facebook Chat Is, In Fact, Useless", posted by Jarred on July 1, 2008

- "iGoogle Goes Social: The Birth of Scaled Automation", posted by Jarred on April 24, 2008

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Jarred Taylor

For sure, Eric. Indeed, it's not even the "companies" who have explicitly joined, but rather representatives from those companies who are signing up for the "workgroup." Right now it's all just words and PR. But the fact that they're not taking the opposite side ("All your data are belong to us") is important, too. Thanks for the VC perspective!

Eric

Don't get too excited yet Jarred/internet world. While Google and Facebook have certainly signed on they have by no means agreed to abide by the quite high aspirations of the data portability movement. Googs and Facebook have only "agreed to talk" about the possibility of opening up their (really your) data to free movement. A good number of people in the Venture community were quick to brush this off as an excellent PR stunt for these groups. While Google may eventually move closer towards data portability expect them to move on their terms which may mean you won't be exporting any contacts easily any time soon. As for Facebook, well, as long as they are still a private company and a VC backed one at that I would bet that data portability won't come until a strong revenue model and actual revenues come streaming into Zuckerberg's pockets.

Eric