The real roadblocks to data portability on social networks. A bunch of smart questions posed by Facebook’s Dave Morin. This is why I think data portability is the wrong framing—moving data between sites is really hard. Importing social relationships between sites is much more viable (hence my interest in social network portability). Also, the complaints about systems sharing e-mail addresses are neatly addressed by using OpenID as the GUID for a user instead. OpenIDs can’t be spammed.
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I'm a Facebook fan as much as anyone, and know Dave from my company having been involved with the Facebook platform launch. I have a lot of respect for him professionally and personally. These are, however, as one of the comments on Scoble's blog points out, policy decisions not technical issues.
Sharing data among sites is not hard to do, and in fact could be made possible by one policy change (i.e. "it's your data, do what you want with it") and by providing API access to the data. Problem solved, move on. ;-) :-)
So the problem is that companies like Facebook are nervous about what this means for their liability, their business models, and generally their control of their product. And maybe rightfully so in some cases. I don't mean this overly critically. I just want to point out that speaking of this as a hard problem is misleading.
It's a simple problem that certain companies (certainly many more than just Facebook) are unwilling to commit to solve.
Deryck Hodge - 27th March 2008 03:03 - #