Is data portability becoming a reality thanks to... Microsoft?

by Brad Linder Mar 25th 2008

There's been a lot of talk over the last few months about the idea of data portability. Because let's face it, as useful as services like Facebook, Plaxo, and LinkedIn can be, the last thing you want to do when signing up for a new service is enter a few hundred names and email addresses that you've already entered somewhere else.

Many services will do a decent job of importing your contacts from another application, say Gmail. But there's no universal standard, which means that there could be some information missing, or if you have a LinkedIn contact that's not in your Google address book, how do you import them into your Facebook account?

Microsoft this week announced partnerships with LinkedIn, Tagged, Hi5, Bebo, and Facebook. Each company has agreed to let users import their contacts using the Windows Live contacts API.

At first glance, the last company we would have expected to propose an answer is Microsoft. The company has a long history of trying to lock users into its own software and services. But the more we think about it, the more it makes sense. Microsoft has also launched Invite2Messenger, a service that makes it easier to invite members of each social network to be your Windows Live Messenger contacts. In other words, if you don't have a strong social network of your own to promote, why not partner with a bunch of popular services in an effort to promote an area where you're already strong: instant messaging.

[via WebWare]

Tags: data-portability, dataportability, invite2messenger, portability

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

Joe Beaulaurier said 5:32PM on 3-25-2008

Add the export component and you have data portability. Without that you simply have yet another service provider who has enabled pushing your contact list from various sources to their platform. I didn't see anything in your post that refers to this two-way street and it is so unlike MS to build anything other than one-way streets leading to their properties.

I followed the link to the announcement. In the announcement there is a reference to "allowing us to create a safe, secure two-way street for users to move their relationships between our respective services."

I'll believe it when I see it I guess. There's nothing two-way up yet that I can see.

Oh and Plaxo? That's a useful service? Since when? My oldest email filter is the one that protects me from my friends who were fooled into spamming their entire address book on Plaxo's behalf.

michael said 7:15PM on 3-25-2008

It's not a surprise. Microsoft has at least been open lately. Take for instance their Live API's (which I've 'heard' were better to work with than Google's), SDK's, CodePlex, joining Dataportability.net and OpenID, FeedSync, WWT, Popfly and Silverlight platform, IE8 going to web standards platform, dev.live.com, Live Gallery Devcenter, and a lot of other things people would consider open.

And there probably will be a 2-way street. Probably each of those sites has a way of importing to the other, though I guess there could be exporting to others as well. It would still work the same way.

It's great to see the web more open. Much easier to move your info. I just hope all this "openness" that people are striving for, will be safe and secure enough to avoid bad guys from getting into our data. Being too open can be kind of a danger, right?

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