Data Portability for Social Networks
I’ve been following the discussion of data portability in the blogosphere and this post is my attempt to make sense of what is happening.
This table is a summary of the various types of portability offered by the large social networks. It is a good starting place for thinking about what portability means and what is planned.
Right now the action seems to be focused on the Data Portability Workgroup which includes all of the key social networks (Google, Facebook, LinkedIn) and large web 2.0 service providers (Flickr, SixApart, and Twitter). The group seems to be working toward a use case where personal data and privacy settings can be shared across the applications.
Under this use case, you can add new contacts to your central profile that then populate across your social applications and networks. When you join a new network, you define your identity and then data associated with your identity (network and privacy settings) gets populated to the new site.
I can really see the value as a user of having this kind of centralized identity that can cross sites. But I can also see how resistant the big social networks will be to making it easy to transport this data across networks and applications. Google’s Open Social initiative is designed to make this possible but it is not yet clear that it will happen. Until data portability is easy and seamless, we will have to work within the confines of multiple networks and apps.