Google and Facebook Join DataPortability Working Group!

January 8, 2008 in Social Networks by Carsten Pötter | Comments

data_portability

Wow, I admit I never thought this would happen: Google and Facebook are joining DataPortability.org! This simply means that two of the biggest brands on the internet are joining a working group to overcome walled gardens, silos, basically let our own data, our social graph become independent of specific social networks.

The recent Scoble/Facebook/Plaxo brouhaha made me think this could be a backlash to social network portability, simply because privacy rules were broken and it could work as the perfect argument against social network portability. But actually this announcement is great, even more so that Joseph Smarr of Plaxo is also involved. Yahoo as well?

I don’t want to be too enthusiastic, though. Nothing has been achieved yet and there is the possibility that the big companies start controlling that group (however Google’s representative is Brad Fitzpatrick which is a good sign) and hamper progress.

Nevertheless this is a great day! :)

[via Read/Write Web]

Tags: Brad Fitzpatrick, Facebook Join DataPortability Working Group, Google, Joseph Smarr, Social Networks, Yahoo

  • Interesting News, but I hope that too many cooks doesn't spoil the broth.
  • No seriously, I think these are very good news for the data/social-network portability scene, because Google and Facebook are "two companies that hold more user data and do more with it than almost any other consumer service on the market" (ReadWriteWeb), so I think there will be several nice portibility-services in the near future.
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