I updated my Twitter status which, through TwitterSync, updated my Facebook status. Facebook, in turn, updated my FriendFeed with that status, but Twitter already updated FriendFeed. Suddenly I realized data portability is closer than we think.
A few weeks ago I wrote about the Info Wars brewing between the social networks on their desire to control our information. MySpace, Facebook, and Google launched their own social networking networking service, allowing users and 3rd-parties to access information inside each walled garden. Facebook quickly blocked Google’s service claiming privacy issues, an attempt to protect its users.
Facebook forgot its API already allows an immense amount of access to user information. Many leading social sites offer APIs, or application programming interfaces, that allow other sites to integrate each other’s systems. Facebook, for all the criticism of its walled garden mentality, is able to import data from many sites and external sites, like FriendFeed, can have data exported. I can’t move all my friends from one site to another…yet. But smaller social networks like Twitter are almost completely functional without ever going to Twitter.com.
The dream is control our content. Now we can just manipulate it. It’s a start. And competition, from new and old and in between social networks will force more open standards that make every site more valuable to users.
3 Comments
July 17, 2008 at 5:27 am
I’ve just noticed your post in the FF room for Data Portability so this is a late comment but still I wanted to share my opinion. Actually I published a post (linked under my name) based on a very similar idea - even if DP is not here, we’ll find other ways to ensure portability of our data ourselves. But it was actually about us migrating from one service to another using the tools we already have - and taking our friends with us. In my case I used FriendFeed for examples but Twitter is also widely used for the very same purpose. I have not thought about the idea like you describe it here but it is definitely equally interesting approach.
July 17, 2008 at 12:32 pm
I think it was the FriendFeed/Twitter relationship that really shaped my thinking on data portability since already people can bypass Twitter completely on FF. Of course the ideal would be to completely export our Twitter data and move to Plurk if we wanted. Twitter won’t want that but the market will force it…in time.
I agree completely with your idea that there would be something centralized, like FriendFeed, to aggregate and allow users to easily manage and edit data in once place to affect several. The challenge will be deciding who gets to control all that aggregated data (a company like FriendFeed or something open source maybe?).
July 18, 2008 at 3:55 am
Yes, Michael, this is exactly what I’m talking about: Data Portability group definitely takes a long time to come up with something actually working and I can’t even predict when we should expect any results at all. In the meanwhile we will find a workaround in the form of FriendFeed or something new that we will be offered (and probably something open-source will be a better option even but it can not guarantee success either).