Plaxo, Facebook, and Google go 'open' by joining DataPortability.org

Filed under: Google, Social Software, web 2.0

Plaxo, Facebook, and Google go 'open' by joining DataPortability.org

by Jason Harris Jan 8th 2008

In the wake of last week's explosion of attention on data portability on social networks, (that is, being able to take your data from one social network to the other) there is a huge development today. Google, Facebook, and Plaxo have all announced they're joining DataPortability.org.

What does this mean? Well to quote the announcement directly, "Users will be able to access their friends and media across all the applications, social networking sites and widgets that implement the design into their systems". Potentially it means social network widget and application creators will be able to write their widgets for use on any compatible social network.

Considering all these social networks are fighting for our attention, we are not sure how 'open' these social graphs will truly be. Will we be able to export our friends list from Facebook and take it over to MySpace and vice versa? Might we be able to take Facebook applications and use them in MySpace?

These are the types of questions that still need to be answered. Stay tuned to Download Squad for updates as they come across the wire.

[via ReadWriteWeb]

Tags: dataportability, facebook, google, plaxo

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

ronin691 said 2:42PM on 1-08-2008

Whoa! That's HUGE news. Possibly the biggest in years!

Let's hope AOL....*cough*downloadsquad*cough*...will step up and give me control of my data too.

Thomas Han said 2:59PM on 1-08-2008

love the selection of photo there! :-)

Jonathan Harford said 10:45PM on 1-08-2008

Screw applications. Just tell me I won't have to cut n' paste to Facebook, Myspace, LiveJournal ad nauseum next time I gain (or lose) an "interest" or favorite film.

Aalaap said 11:26PM on 1-08-2008

I think it's time for a meta-social networking site that will put all your Facebook, Orkut, MySpace, Hi5 and whatever else friends, messages, apps etc. into one site so you don't have to bother with the individual ones. Every site should support a standard SNAPI (social networking API) to do the basics: search/add friends, messages/scraps, events, applications etc.

victor said 7:45AM on 1-09-2008

Hi,
Aalaap, we try to do something like that (free social data and social graph) here http://www.osocial.net/network but it still a beta with some tests and lot of features to be implemented ...
Victor

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