Digital Design Blog

2008 Forecast: Data Portability Means Sharing is Caring

Yesterday, Google and Facebook announced that they would be joining the Data Portability Workgroup. The workgroup was founded with the goal of creating a reference design document that contains the best practices for integrating existing open standards and protocols for maximum interoperability.

Issues of data portability, openness and ownership of data recently came to the forefront after the high profile blogger Robert “Scobeleizer” Scoble’s Facebook account was disabled after writing an automatic script to port his 5,000-strong contacts list to another social networking site. Such a move sparked a huge debate about openness and ownership of data. Industry giants such as Facebook came under increasing criticism regarding their lack of willingness to share their users’ data.

In a press release, Scoble challenged Facebook to start data sharing between services. It appears Facebook accepted his challenge and such a move could dramatically affect users’ experiences by allowing them to access their friends and media across applications, social networking sites and widgets that implement to the same standards. It will also benefit vendors who are able to leverage standards based data exchange across sites. The fact that representatives of Yahoo, Myspace, Seesmic, Disney, BBC, NineMSN, Dow Jones/Fox are members of the data portability workgroup lends support to the notion that the concept of a truly open web is growing.

How far they will open up their data from behind their walled garden and just how they will respect a user’s right to privacy and ownership of data remains to be seen, but the fact that the two companies who own the most user data on the web have announced that they will join the data portability initiative is going to mean exciting things will be happening within this space. Some industry analysts are even speculating that yesterday will go down as a very important day in internet history.