The non-portability of datapolitics

Robert Scoble on Dataportability, being fed a hook, line and sinker from Facebook:

So, what’s the problem, beyond the politics of some of this stuff (will Facebook join the Dataportability.org? Who cares? Has the Dataportability.org actually shipped anything yet beyond PR?)

WHAT IS THE HOLDUP?

It’s not easy to do any of this stuff. On Saturday I talked with Dave Morin, head of Facebook’s application platform.

He brought up use case after use case that I hadn’t really thought through.

For instance, what if a user wants to delete his or her info off of Facebook. Today that’s possible. But what about in a really data portable world? After all, in such a world Facebook might have sprayed your email and other data to other social networks. What if those other social networks don’t want to delete your data after you asked Facebook to?

Well, for a starters the UK had to threaten Facebook re the im-possibility of deleting data off Facebook. But the rest of the story is more a lesson in Facebook et al not wanting to let go of the Social Graph, as that is their main value proposition.

Its very simple conceptually - just let the user own their own Social Graph, in some open format, with API's and sufficient control of intimacy layers, and they take the risks. Its also non-trivial, but very do-able - we've done the conceptual architecture (we did one 2 years ago) and I know others have too - as one of the commentators, Tom Morris notes:

Dave Morin sounds like he’s spreading FUD. There are existing implementations - like the ability to import your contacts into Dopplr from Twitter and from any page with hCards. That works fine, and nobody is bitching about the privacy concerns of this.

A lot of people are bringing up “policy” reasons why this kind of thing can’t happen. The fact is that they are already happening. I’m sceptical that it’ll be groups like DataPortability.org that’ll push this - it’s more likely it’ll be hackers working together in an ad-hoc way will solve the problems. Then the vendors will jump in front of the parade and start preaching openness when it becomes inevitable.

Couldn't have said it better......

Update - there is clearly a Zeitgeist at work here - at about the same time I wrote this, Chris Pirillo launched a very ambitious plan for people to collaborate to write a simple social front-end based on Drupal. (Cough! Drupal? I hear those of you who have wrestled with it ask....