There have been a number of announcements recently concerning data portability, social network interoperability and common authentication across different web sites, but alas we are not much closer to any of them.
TechCrunch alluded to the rather ambivalent attitude of major social networking sites to a clearly identified user desire for portability and interoperability, and Marc Canter chipped in with a typically passionate post, but I think Dare Obasanjo provides the best roundup of these developments in his recent post some thoughts on Facebook Connect, Google Friend Connect and MySpace data availability:
"So do these new widget initiatives help portability? Nope. Widgets give developers less options for obtaining and interacting with the user data than APIs. With Facebook's REST API, I know how to get my friends list with profile data into Outlook and my Windows Mobile phone via OutSync. I would actually lose that functionality if it was only exposed via a widget. The one thing they do is lower the bar for integration by people who don't know how to code.
Well, how about interoperability? The idea of social network interoperability is that instead of being a bunch of walled gardens and data silos, social networking sites can talk to each other the same way email services and [some] IM services can talk to each other today. The 'Use our data silo instead of building your own' pitch may reduce the number of data silos but it doesn't change the fact that the Facebooks and MySpaces of the world are still fundamentally data silos when it comes to the social graph. That is what we have to change. Instead we keep getting distracted along the way by shiny widgets."
We really, really need a simple system for people to share their own data in whatever way they choose, and particularly for them to be able to use a single trusted login across multiple sites. OAuth looks hopeful as a piece of this puzzle, and OpenID remains the most commonly used single sign-on method, but it is still too fiddly for non-technical users, and in some ways too flimsy.
Here's hoping we start to make real progress soon, rather than wait for the far-too-powerful and over-capitalised social networks to consolidate the position of their own limited mechanisms.
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