The DataPortability Workgroup announced this morning that representatives from both Google and Facebook are joining its ranks. The group is working on a variety of projects to foster an era of Data Portability - where users can take their data from the websites they use to reuse elsewhere and where vendors can leverage safe cross-site data exchange for a whole new level of innovation. Good bye customer lock-in, hello to new privacy challenges. If things go right, today could be a very important day in the history of the internet.
The non-participation of Google and Facebook, two companies that hold more user data and do more with it than almost any other consumer service on the market, was the biggest stumbling block to the viability of the project. These are two of the most important companies in recent history - what's being decided now is whether they will be walled-garden, data-horders or truly open platforms tied into a larger ecosystem of innovation with respect for user rights and sensible policies about data.
Google will be represented by Brad Fitzpatrick, the inventor of LiveJournal and one of the primary minds behind OpenID, the concept of the Social Graph and the Google-led OpenSocial platform. Facebook will be represented by Benjamin Ling, who today runs the Facebook platform. Ling defected from Google three months ago, where he ran Google Checkout, to join Facebook. Also joining the workgroup is Joseph Smarr of Plaxo, probably the catalyst for all of this after his company scraped Robert Scoble's Facebook account and set off a huge debate about Data Portability and privacy.
If these industry titans can put aside their rivalry and work together - magic could happen. Hopefully they can work appropriately with the other members of the working group, bleeding edge consultants and representatives of smaller and in many cases more user-centric companies. If so, perhaps we can move appropriately into a future of powerful personalization and logically augmented activity online - while avoiding Minority Report-style dystopian scenarios.
Innovation on the internet is in its early, early days. The participation of representatives from Google and Facebook in this initiative could prove key in the continued development of what's possible, instead of the early suffocation of what could have been.
May the participants work nicely together to create the magic that we're waiting for.
See also: The ReadWriteWeb toollkit for 2008, where you'll find resources for tracking data portability and other key issues in the coming year.
Note: comments were off temporarily due to a poorly timed database error. But they are back now.
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This is wonderful news for the open web.
Posted by: Andrew Mager | January 8, 2008 9:55 AM
This has the potential for significant goodness in our industry. It's taking the concept of 'open' to new heights. Bravo to those with the insight to think and act for the greater good.
Posted by: pete grillo | January 8, 2008 10:02 AM
This is a surprising move by the big players. We'll see how long they can play nice. I don't think the average person will care much about this until it gets a LOT more media attention. But even the regular media doesn't care much about this stuff- yet. As soon as tangible benefits become more obvious to the mainstream, they will suddenly discover this story for themselves. If I was a betting man, I'd say late February '09?
Posted by: Jason Thodor | January 8, 2008 10:04 AM
I can hardly believe this - That they both are getting on board! Well done to Chris Saad and compadres. I hope Yahoo get onboard as well... and the blue monster?
Posted by: dc crowley | January 8, 2008 10:07 AM
This is awesome news. I'm very excited that Scoble's Facebook kerfluffle might have brought this about, because it means he did more than just exercise his indluence for ego purposes. He acted for the common good.
Posted by: francine hardaway | January 8, 2008 10:08 AM
Damn, this is really good news. Looks like a lot of people had some early predictions right very quickly.
Posted by: Uno de Waal | January 8, 2008 10:12 AM
a small step for big companies can be a giant leap for internet innovation. Let's start creating value on top of the overrated sns's
Posted by: NilsR | January 8, 2008 10:24 AM
I'm not a titan - but I play one in a soap opera called 'open social networking'. You might have heard of me before.
For some reason my name is not on the list of supporters.
Please add my name - as I really think DataPortability is coolio!
Posted by: Marc Canter | January 8, 2008 12:55 PM
Marc, your name is on the list on dataportability.org. I didn't write about every one of the very charming members of the crew in this post - just the newest and biggest. You and the other coolio cats already participating deserve lots of thanks and wishes well.
Posted by: Marshall Kirkpatrick
|
January 8, 2008 1:08 PM
The Data Portability Workgroup has by far produced the least amount of progress in the open web space. It is a group of some of the best and dedicated thinkers in this space, but even after participating in the conversation for a little bit, I still don't understand what they are really trying to do. What their deliverable are.
If I was Facebook, and I wanted to do some damage control or PR for being open and nice, the Data Portability Workgroup would be the perfect effort to join. After all, go try to figure out what Facebook has actually agreed to? And Facebook can already say they support data portability (its bidirectional portability they have an issue with).
By itself, this means nothing. If anything, it can make the Data Portability Workgroup weaker if after this big hoopla, nothing comes out of it. There is nothing worse than unattainable expectations.
Posted by: Eran Hammer-Lahav | January 8, 2008 1:29 PM
It's interesting to think about what Google and Facebook's validation of DataPortability means for Enterprise social software, and who's participating in those standards. I just put a blog post up about this http://tinyurl/36e5ta
Posted by: Sam Lawrence | January 8, 2008 1:51 PM
Nice scoop, Marshall.
If indeed the big guys walk the walk they’re talking — a big if — the real impact of today’s announcement will be a dramatic increase in the number of people behaving socially. Think of all those Yahoo! Mail and Gmail users seamlessly making their contacts the center for their social own social experiences, many (if not most) for the very first time. All the Facebook-mania aside, social media is just getting warmed up.
But even if Facebook comes through and opens the garden, I wouldn’t expect anything resembling a flight of users. Facebook became Facebook in no small part by delivering a great user experience, and so long as it continues to make people happy, people will flock to it, data potability or not.
More here: http://brijit.wordpress.com/2008/01/08/take-your-data-and-run-like-hell/
Posted by: JeremyB | January 8, 2008 2:03 PM
I’m not sure about this announcement. First of all everyone who has said that no one is actually committing to anything here is absolutely right. Just because people who work at Google and Facebook are on the committee it doesn’t mean that data is going to be portable from Facebook to NewSocialNetwork.com anytime soon.
I think that the issue is being clouded though. If you could move your information about friends etc (your social graph) right now would you? Where would you move it to? Moving your social graph is not going to be useful unless all of your friends (or at least some of them) move too. In this way making data portable is not really going to change anything about the lock in with social networks. People are going to stay where people they know are. Similar arguments debunk the significance of Open Social. People don’t switch networks for applications or widgets. They move because of their friends.
What is needed instead is to make the rich experience of a social network standardised. I think Google knows this. The real future is ONE social network for everyone. I see social networking as an extension to email. From Gmail I can email people on Hotmail and they can email me back. There is a communication standard there. So what we need is a standard account type (that is OpenID) and then standards for feeds of activity (that’s RSS), and standards for everything else you do on a social network. Once the social networking “scape” is fully open in this way people can use their own bit of the network (essentially their network provider) like Facebook, or Google, or Bebo, or whatever. And it might have slightly different features just like the way that Gmail has different features to Hotmail but it would have all been the same network. So I can switch from Google to Facebook and I’ll see a different interface but can browse my friends on whichever network provider they’ve chosen.
OpenID and a standard social graph is the key. As far as I can tell there is no benefit in the “half-way” solution where I can move my data from Facebook to Orkut. My friends will still be on Facebook. Fingers crossed this can go all the way.
Posted by: Sam Davyson | January 8, 2008 2:40 PM
Over at my ZDNet blog, I've played the skeptic.
Over a year ago, speaking at the Web 2.0 summit, Google CEO Eric Schmidt told attendees:
"If you look at the historical large company behavior, they ultimately do things to protect their business practices or monopoly or what have you, against the choice of the users… The more we can, for example, let users move their data around, never trap the data of an end user, let them move it if they don’t like us, the better."
... that was over 12 months ago and I don’t remember seeing any significant moves by Google to enable me to move my data elsewhere. It remains, for the most part, as trapped as ever.
Facebook has appeared just as disingenuous, with founder Mark Zuckerberg calling the site’s lack of data portability a “bug”. Yeah right. It’s not a bug but a feature, designed to lock users in long enough for Facebook to reach a dominant enough position. The “bug” can be squashed once Facebook’s network effects have created enough lock-in of their own. Maybe that time is near.
Posted by: Steve | January 8, 2008 3:55 PM
Without a doubt, this will be a very important chapter to watch unfold ... and how.
Posted by: Charlie Anzman | January 8, 2008 4:05 PM
This is good news, but let's not get too excited until we see how serious Google and Facebook are, respectively, about actually opening up their networks. As has already been pointed out, there's a big difference between joining a standard body and actually taking concrete steps.
In the meantime, we'll be continuing to develop the world's first truly federated social-networking platform, OpenQabal. :-)
phil
Posted by: Phillip Rhodes | January 8, 2008 4:31 PM
There's already a solution, "cut and paste", has worked for decades.
Posted by: PJ Brunet | January 8, 2008 7:21 PM
That might work if you don't have many friend :) but you try to cut and paste a couple of hundred contacts and you will soon wish the main players were more supportive of this sort of initiative.
Personally I am surprised that facebook is into this. I would have thought they would be afraid of losing their dominant position in the market. Maybe they figure they will be able to steal users from competitors or that in the future we will all use multiple networking platforms ...
Posted by: Hubbers | January 9, 2008 3:12 AM
Wow... and AGAIN a nice scoop by you guys!
Posted by: Gunnar andreassen | January 9, 2008 5:45 AM
For an important look at the serious privacy issues of the current walled garden architectures of social networks see this excellent podcast of Eben Moglen, Software Freedom Law Center, speaking at the MySQL conference. Two key questions Moglen raises are: “Is store it yourself fundamental to freedom in the 20th Century?” and, “Who gets the logs?”
For some interesting technical,legal, and policy suggestions from Eben Moglen on how privacy could be protected in open architectures that support data interoperability between social networks see this conversation between Eben Moglen and David Levine (IBM).
Posted by: Tish Shute | January 9, 2008 6:44 AM
So an article by Robert Scoble is all it took.
Posted by: Pallab | January 9, 2008 7:11 AM
I'm not quit sure the term bombshell is in order here. Google has had plans for data portability as early as 2006 as you can see in my article.
But further this is great news for all online folks that no longer need to stick with one site but can browse around with there data to find a service that agrees with them.
Good post Marshall,
thanks.
Posted by: Peter | January 9, 2008 2:53 PM
This is really good news. I'm excited that exercise for it's ego purposes. So like a lot of people had some early predictions right very quickly.
Posted by: 7days | January 9, 2008 5:12 PM
I hope the Data Portability Workgroup comes to fruition and develops some sort of open standard wherein people can link to each others content like pictures, files, and music. It would be fantastic if they could do that. Then they could give the final product a name. A name like, oh, I dunno, THE WORLD WIDE WEB.
Social networks are redundant to the world wide web's very nature. People are moving billions of dollars around each other over architecture that is easily replicated using HTML and freakin' Microsoft Notepad.
Dave
Posted by: tdave365 | January 26, 2008 3:44 AM