The missing question in data-portability
Amidst all the current uproar surrounding Facebook, Robert Scoble, Plaxo and the responses. Many have joined open data exchange advocate groups, such as dataportability.org. See the intro movie below.
This post is not about this movie or DataPortability. This is post is about the un-asked question behind these initiatives.
The need from a customers perspective is obvious, but what about vendors? Even though open standards like RSS, Microformats, OpenID etc. are being championed, most online services are still little (or big) islands hard to connect or synchronize. The problem is in getting your preciously gathered information, your data out. However the question not being asked enough is:
What are the incentives for companies to share data?
It’s very healthy to see so much attention being given to this important problem. The core question now being asked is: Who’s data is it actually? Thankfully the philosophical consensus seems to on the users’ side. That is that data you create anywhere is yours. The problem is that even though you might own those contacts, relationships or wall-posts, you still rely on the service vendor to provide access to your data. More importantly you also rely on the service or vendor to create tools so you can use you data elsewhere. And here is the question above rephrased:
What is a vendors incentive to help you take your business (and your data) elsewhere?
Or even more plainly:
Why should or would Facebook, allow you to take "your" Facebook data to a third party like Plaxo?
My short and simple answer:
to get a smaller piece of a bigger pie.
The guys from Spinn3r manage to word it clearer than I could:
This open data is becoming more and more valuable – not just to the company writing the applications that create the open data but to the entire ecosystem. ... This needs to be solved not from the perspective of user portability but from that of an open content network where all players have equal access to the data.
However it would be good for parties such as DataPortability to also look to increasing the awareness of incentives for large social networks such as Facebook to participate. We’re hoping that the DataPortability initiative will bear fruits in that the end user will be able to use their data more freely AND securely across your favorite services. We also hope that Soocial can provide a high quality slice of that pie.
Haha. Scary picture. Anyway good style! Props for your work, but i dont get: wheres your unique selling point in comparasion to plaxo?
Thanks lg, there is a lot of differences between Soocial and Plaxo. We sync with most popular phones, our focus lies purely on contacts, having them available where you want. In Gmail, Highrise, your Mac, PC and your phone.
Plus we don't spam you and your friends. ;-)