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It is a frustrating fact of modern internet life. Users of websites such as Facebook and Google spend hours building up and maintaining friend lists and e-mail address books, but when it comes time to move such social information to another online service, they frequently find it impossible to get their data back out. Instead, they must start re-entering their personal details from scratch.
That may soon change. Over the past year, growing numbers of influential voices have been calling for the creation of common standards for "data portability" — a move that would enable widespread sharing of social information between websites.
Advocates of portable data argue that such an open approach would not just make life easier for users who want to migrate between websites; it could change the very economics of the web itself as companies rush to build new services that take advantage of the free flow of social information.
"Each website they go to, [people] have to keep saying who their friends are," says Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the world wide web. "If, instead, they had a file of friends, the website would be able to just pick it up: this is me, these are my friends and colleagues, do the right thing."
The notion of a portable friends list is just part of a broader vision of making many different types of user-specific data portable between websites. That vision got a boost last week after Yahoo, the internet portal, said it would support an initiative to develop a common login scheme across websites. The addition of Yahoo's 248 million users will more than triple the number of OpenID accounts.
Goal
OpenID is one of several web standards being promoted by the DataPortability Workgroup, a loosely-knit group of technologists who are at the forefront of the data portability movement. The workgroup's goal is to persuade the internet industry to support a common scheme for importing and exporting personal information that has traditionally been confined to individual websites.
Some of the world's most influential internet companies have taken note. This month Google, the internet search group, Facebook, the social network, and Plaxo, an online contact management service, assigned representatives to join the workgroup.
Some believe the advent of truly portable social data could usher in new web services that far exceed the capabilities of existing "Web 2.0" sites. "We are on the cusp of the next phase of the web," says John McCrea, chief marketing officer at Plaxo. "We think we are about to see a major transformation, as things that have been powered inside 'walled garden' social networks become part of the open web."
In a world of portable data, "suddenly it would be possible for two people in a garage to create a website or application that can take advantage of [social connections] without having to invest in building up their own social network," McCrea says. Any travel site, for example, could include a feature that would allow a user to broadcast information about an upcoming business trip to all of their friends, regardless of what social networks they belonged to.
Excitement is palpable. "This is the trend of 2008," says Jeremiah Owyang, analyst at Forrester Research.
Yet it is uncertain whether such excitement will translate into meaningful change on the part of internet incumbents, many of which have spent millions of dollars compiling the vast banks of social information that data portability advocates are trying to set free.
Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook's founder, has frequently touted the company's intimate knowledge of the web of social connections between its users — a series of links it refers to as the "social graph" — as a key competitive advantage. That advantage could be diminished if Facebook's social graph is made available to outside websites.
Approach
Although Facebook has assigned a representative to the DataPortability Workgroup, it appears to be adopting a wait-and-see approach. Facebook declined to make an executive available to comment for this article. In response to written questions, a spokeswoman said that the company was "evaluating what [data portability] really means".
"I'd suspect that the individual social networks view the social graph as their intellectual property and don't necessarily want it opened up," says Ali Partovi, chief executive of iLike, a music-sharing application that is one of the most popular social features on Facebook.
In the end, incumbents may have little choice but to go along with data portability or risk being swept out with the tide, as start-ups and other underdogs race to take advantage of portable social information, according to David Glazer, chief of engineering at Google. He says Google is an "enthusiastic embracer" of data portability.
Glazer points to the popularisation of the web browser in the mid-1990s, which ultimately forced internet service providers such as Prodigy to abandon their proprietary, closed systems for accessing internet content. Similarly, he says, truly portable social data could force companies whose business models rely on data "lock-in" to change their strategies or face obsolescence.
Supporters of data portability admit that it is still early days. "There are millions of people involved [but] there are only a relatively small number of social networking sites that are exporting," says Berners-Lee.
Privacy is likely to be a key sticking point as companies attempt to convince users to trust them to broadcast their information to other websites. Members of the DataPortability Workgroup stress that any scheme would include controls to prevent sensitive personal information from being sent out without a user's permission.
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