Data Portability

Everyone loves social media services and everyone loves data portability. Or at least, it seems so. My feed reader is chock full of articles on those topics (well, that simply means I read the wrong blogs or at least I have a very narrow view on what’s going on in technology these days, right?). The latest darlings of the early adopters and social media evangelists are FriendFeed and Disqus.

Fragmented Comments

If you don’t know already, FriendFeed is not only a lifestreaming service but users can comment on friends’ blog posts, Flickr photos, and other shared items in their lifestream. There is also a WordPress plugin available which shows comments from FriendFeed to the related posts on your blog. Disqus is a blog commenting system which aggregates all comments made by one user in a single place. While blog owners can run Disqus on their own blogs, comments are not part of the blog system, e.g. WordPress or Movable Type, anymore. So both systems allow people to comment on blog articles while the discussion doesn’t necessarily has to take place on the respected blogs.

So essentially comments can be spread over various and often disparate networks and services. Blog posts can be digged, stumbled upon, and mixxed. Other blog authors can send pingbacks and trackbacks and all those systems offer the opportunity to leave comments. If this happens to you as a blog author you have problems keeping track of the discussion which originated from your blog.

Who Owns the Comments?

So how does this relate to data portability? Well, over the last few days a discussion has emerged about who actually owns comments. If you comment on my blog, do I own the comment or do you own it? It’s my blog, but your ideas, thoughts, and words. Currently I am free to edit or even delete comments. And if I decide to delete an article all comments made on the article will be deleted as well. And if I discontinue the blog all comments will also disappear.

So are FriendFeed, Disqus and similar services a solution to preserve comments? Should they be portable from my blog to any system and service that can make use of them? My first thought was “Sure, I write the comment, I own it”. I still think it should be that way but does it make sense? Are comments worth anything if the original post is deleted? Hardly. Who could ever understand what you were referring to? Also if every commenter could edit or delete their comments at will (because they own them) conversations could become pointless. Commenter B refers to commenter A, but later commenter A deletes their comment. Bye, bye discussion.

While I am an advocate of data portability, the question of ownership of comments shows that not everything we wish and hope for will really work in reality. I really like FriendFeed a lot (more than I initially thought I would) and haven’t made a final decison on Disqus yet. Also I don’t have any problems if comments appear on various services but I don’t think it makes sense that comments are owned by commenters.

What’s your stance on this? Do you know any other scenarios where data portability doesn’t make sense?

DataPortability, Data Availability, Facebook Connect, Google Friend Connect, DiSo,… Did I forget any initiative? Probably. Can you tell without cheating who is supporting those initiatives? Which technologies are used? Are those initiatives even trying to solve the same problem? And if so, why are they called different?

From the outset data portability wasn’t easy to explain. And not just to your average end user, by the way. It seems like every company has its own idea of what data portability is and should be about. Despite press releases filled with claims about openness, portability, and general user friendliness, companies still want to protect their most precious assets: users and their data. They might join working groups but still they rather play by their own rules. It is disappointing to say the least.

All the mentioned initiatives just lead to confusion. We can’t be sure if we mean the same thing when talking about data portability anymore. It’s probably best to abandon that term and just focus on single issues. Can I export my profile or can it just be accessed by a third party? Are open standards used or proprietary technologies? You get the picture.

You decide.

• Mahalo has rolled out support for microformats. [via notizBlog, via Sean Percival]
• The DataPortability group has chosen a new logo and is six months old by now. Congrats! [via Mr Topf]
• While FeedDemon supports it since a few months already, Newsgator Online is also supporting APML now. [via Read/Write Web]

Silently MyBlogLog has introduced MicroID to user profile pages. It hasn’t been added to blog community pages, though. So verification of blogs still only works with MyBlogLog’s <Meta> tag. I have managed to verify my blog now, by the way.

Also FOAF data has been added to user pages this month, expanding MyBlogLog’s list of open standards. It’s really good to see more and more companies experimenting with open standards.

[via ClaimID]