Facebook & Google join DataPortability Workgroup: What does it mean to you?

Thursday, January 10. 2008

TechCrunch has news that Facebook and Google have joined the DataPortability Workgroup.

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.

It is an important step that Facebook has entered the conversation, but until there is an "export" tab in my Facebook profile, I'll remain a bit skeptical.

On the other hand, if the major social network and online media / search sites adopt a common social graph standard, the fun really starts. Porting profile and friends from network to network is a problem with limited scope... frankly, not very exciting. What I find really exciting is the possibility of being able to port and mashup content, reputation and recommendations from multiple sources.

Regardless, this is an important first step to the "majors" at the table.

What do you think? Especially the folks who host communities for their organizations: How does this impact you?

Posted by Bill Johnston in News at 12:11 | Comments (2) | Trackbacks (0)

Trackbacks

Trackback specific URI for this entry

No Trackbacks

Comments

Display comments as (Linear | Threaded)

Hello Bill,

I've just discovered your blog. There's lots of good insights here.

Regarding your question, perhaps the best way to implement this type of reference design is to create an extensible framework -- but agree to incorporate a small useful part of the schema as soon as they become available.

Just as OpenID has addressed the userID/pwd issue, there are probably other practical open standard implementations that can be quickly aggregated to start developing momentum for this workgroup.

The problem with many of this standards efforts is they attempt too much too soon and get stuck in "analysis paralysis" mode.

#1 David H. Deans (Homepage) on 2008-01-12 11:26 (Reply)

I belive that this is just another WEB 2.0 approach - our social network portability is on my opinion logical way and I in the future we will develop "personal social network exchange" as a standard.

Regards,
Igor

#2 Igor Pečovnik (Homepage) on 2008-01-16 16:44 (Reply)

Add Comment

Name
Email
Homepage
In reply to
Comment	Enclosing asterisks marks text as bold (word), underscore are made via _word_. Standard emoticons like :-) and ;-) are converted to images. E-Mail addresses will not be displayed and will only be used for E-Mail notifications To prevent automated Bots from commentspamming, please enter the string you see in the image below in the appropriate input box. Your comment will only be submitted if the strings match. Please ensure that your browser supports and accepts cookies, or your comment cannot be verified correctly. Enter the string from the spam-prevention image above:
	Remember Information? Subscribe to this entry
Submitted comments will be subject to moderation before being displayed.