Ever since Robert Scoble got banned from Facebook, the idea of data portability has been abuzz all over the internet, the idea that one should be able to take their data anywhere. It started last week with Facebook being invited to join the Data Portability Workgroup. After that, Facebook, Google, and Plaxo joined the group. It was running a Plaxo script that got Scoble banned from Facebook in the first place, because the script used screen scraping to harvest Facebook data, which is a violation of Facebook’s TOS. Following that LinkedIn, SixApart, and Flickr joined. Then people from Drupal, Netvibes, and Mystrands.

This all started because Robert Scoble broke the Facebook TOS and has cascaded into everyone seemingly supporting data portability, at least on its face. Loren Feldman of 1938 media during the original Scoblegate(what its come to be called, which is pretty hilarious if you ask me), posted a parody of the Leave Britney alone video called, Leave Scoble Alone and just recently in response to all the companies joining this work group entitled Data Portability, So What.

I completely agree with him, so the data is going to portable. Is anyone actually going to move it? I doubt it, I don’t see people leaving Facebook anytime soon, or Flickr, or Google, or any of these huge companies that have become so entrenched that lets be honest, you may be able to take the data somewhere else, but you’re not going to, the only thing I can see being good about this is if photos are exportable in large groups, but that’d only be good if you could do it with others photos, and thats not really your data to begin with, you should already have copies of your own photos to begin with.

The only use for data portability is what Robert Scoble got in trouble for, taking the contact details of all his contacts and exporting them to a content management service, Plaxo. But thats exactly what I don’t want to happen with my data, I don’t want you taking my data and putting it in your other website in a large group, I made the contact information available to you, and to Facebook, I didn’t make it available to some other third party, because frankly I may not trust them. Now you may, and thats fine, you can take my data and manually enter it, if we’re already friends chances are you have my contact information anyway, if you don’t, maybe thats a sign that we really shouldn’t be friends on an internet site.

And that my friends is the ultimate issue, people viewing friending on internet sites a lot differently then they view friending in real life. People are friends on these sites with people they have never met, and whom they probably will never meet, Robert Scoble has 4,999 Facebook friends, many of whom he doesn’t even know. I’m sure they think its cool to be friends with him on Facebook, and frankly they probably didn’t think he’d do anything with their information, and he certainly doesn’t have time to manually copy it down, but now he can easily do that, and that should make them feel a little uneasy, it should make anyone who friends people they don’t really know on these services uneasy, because before real manpower had to be put in to harvesting this data, but now with this data portability it will be insanely easy. That is if this isn’t just PR to make people think these services are opening up when really they aren’t. Now Plaxo is not the first to do this, there is a Facebook application FriendCSV that will export all your friends details to a CSV file so you can export it, but it didn’t scale up to the amount of friends Robert Scoble had. Plaxo or FriendCSV, it doesn’t matter, I want there to be a human barrier to the transport of my data, and I’m glad that Facebook banned Scoble, I am, however, not glad that they let him back in, or that they are embracing this data portability.

I mean what does it ultimately get you in the end? You’re still going to have to re-friend these people if they join another social network besides Facebook, if they’re really your friends you should have their information anyway, and if they aren’t you can still get it manually, its not going to be ultimately useful for the thing it would be most useful for, photos, so overall, it’s just a bad idea.

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