Data Portability Games

8 January 2008

Google, Facebook and Plaxo join DataPortability.org

Read: Google, Facebook and Plaxo all know a good bit of PR when they see it.

Sorry for the snarky-ness, but I just can’t help but feel this is all pure hype and no substance to capitalise on that silly Facebook Vs Scoble Vs Plaxo stuff. That’s not to say that what DataPortablity.org are trying to do isn’t admirable – as it is – and it’s also not to say that having these key players on board isn’t important – the whole thing would be pointless without them – but this strikes me as yet another in the long line of recent announcements coming from this group of companies that actually mean nothing.

See OpenSocial for another example.

It will be great if we see companies like Google and Facebook (who cares about Plaxo, quite frankly?) embrace technologies like OpenID and XFN but quite frankly 1) I’ll believe it when I see it and 2) I’m not sure if anyone really cares. It’s point 2) that is of course more interesting – outside of the geeks that care about this sort of thing (and I count myself in that group) is data portability really something that the general populous using social software really care about?

At the moment I would hazard a guess that the herd have exposure to maybe 2 social networks – first MySpace and then Facebook – and that’s it. I’m sure that something else will come along to replace what people are using at the moment but I can’t see people massively caring about switching sites every couple of years and not taking their data with them. In fact, I think the ability to clean the slate and start again is one of the drivers for people to change sites; social networking has a lot in common with traditional video games, and the quest to add friends and customise your pages has a lot in common with gaming achivements – starting a fresh lets you play again.

The main reason why this is interesting at all on a wider level is the potential for interesting applications that can then be built of this data; I think Data Portability may be a slight misnomer – Data Accessibility might be a more appropriate term. Hopefully this effort will enable something interesting to come out of it, although I still remain to be convinced; hopefully it doesn’t suffer the current fate of Microformats: great in theory but ultimately lacking a killer app that makes it worthwhile.