Data Portability
There’s been plenty of talk about data portability over the past few weeks, what with Facebook taking issue with a Plaxo script that imported user data from one social network to the other. But the news has mostly dealt with tiffing and squabbling–until now.
A group called the DataPortability Workgroup announced Tuesday that representatives from Facebook, Google, and Plaxo have signed on as members. The group, spearheaded by Chris Saad of start-up Faraday Media, is a sort of alliance of Web thinkers devoted to “(putting) all existing technologies and initiatives in context to create a reference design for end-to-end data portability.”
The problem with this is that there are a million ways to do this.. and currently a million sites that have some if not all aspects of this.. Some of them are ‘members’ but yet still do it alone. For example, you could literally RSS everything from a custom Google page… the openID aspect would be missing, but it’s been rife with some security issues.. and not everyone is on board with openID.
The squabbling isn’t going to finish… in fact it’s just going to increase, at the end these partners want the traffic to themselves..