Scobleizer - Latest Comments in The real roadblocks to data portability on social networks

Re: The real roadblocks to data portability on social networks

Andy Winters — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 23:43:04 -0000

Who wants to port their comments from one site to the next anyway? I don't really think that's the purpose. If someone needs to go elsewhere then so be it. Leave some clutter behind.

Re: The real roadblocks to data portability on social networks

John Maas — Sun, 13 Jul 2008 14:11:13 -0000

Yup, I'm just waiting for this to happen too.

Re: The real roadblocks to data portability on social networks

Carter f Smith — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 18:16:20 -0000

I'm not sure that this will be a profitable venture for Microsoft, but it's worth a try. We know that owning a centrally located piece of real estate and inviting big names to stake their claim there has worked in the real world in the past. Microsoft has shown their ability in Web 1.0 to make money, and it's apparent that no one in social networking has figured out how to do that yet . . .

The Microsoft strategy appears to start with inviting your friends and connections to connect on Windows Live Messenger (not sounding a lot like portability here -- I am thinking "import from").

So I tried the only currently available option -- Facebook. A login to Facebook screen (with Windows Live logo but a Facebook URL) popped up, and the first try on login failed (hmmm, a phishing site?). But the next screen had the Facebook logo, and it logged me in just fine. I didn't however, see where I could add anyone to an invite list, so . . . I gave up and started blogging.

So we'll just keep beta testing while Microsoft keeps building . . .

http://carterfsmith.blogspo...

Re: The real roadblocks to data portability on social networks

mike wood — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 22:06:29 -0000

I don't think by the end of the year, but it needs to happen soon. hell, one example... I would like it once when I leave comments on blogs that I don't need to remember the logins for wordpress, blogger and who knows what else, and the myriad of email addresses I used over the years to set them up. I can't tell you how many times I wanted to leave a comment but the moment passed by the time I either created an ID for something, hunted for the login, or reset a password. Sounds small scale, but a single sign on for all that would be huge.

Re: The real roadblocks to data portability on social networks

Hex — Sun, 30 Mar 2008 14:48:46 -0000

Matt (comment #6) says:

"We really need to push for an Open spec on social markup. A downloadable file (like OPML for feeds) marked up with microformats containing your social profile information... all you should have to do is import this file containing all info..."

That would be FOAF. It was around a long time before the current crop of social networks, and has had an awful lot of work put into it by some very smart people. I'm surprised nobody here has mentioned it yet, as it's an idea whose time has clearly come. See it at: http://www.foaf-project.org/

Re: The real roadblocks to data portability on social networks

bhc3 — Sat, 29 Mar 2008 17:33:06 -0000

One idea I've had about this issue relates to the lifestream aggregators. Is it possible to view FriendFeed as your "social network cloud"? All the updates from the various social networks feed the cloud.

Then you look at something like Twitter or Jaiku less as THE social network, and more as a social application. Your friends see your updates via FriendFeed, not via Twitter. They can comment directly on the FriendFeed site.

In such a scenario, switching from something like Twitter to Jaiku or Pownce means you don't lose the connections you have. They keep up with you via the lifestream cloud. Same idea could apply for moving from Flickr to SmugMug. People don't keep up with you via the social app - they follow you on the lifestream aggregator. A backdoor way to data (or maybe social network) portability.

More thoughts here: http://tinyurl.com/29cu6k

Re: The real roadblocks to data portability on social networks

GP — Sat, 29 Mar 2008 15:59:57 -0000

I think the most important point is that sometimes we don't want every network to know everything. I might want to delete my info from one network but not another. And, just like you suggested, I use a different email address for every site I join. Any sort of data propagation between networks would have to be entirely optional.

Re: The real roadblocks to data portability on social networks

Kaliya Hamlin — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 16:31:27 -0000

This issues you raise are important. I have been working for 4 years almost full time to help support the evolution of a community to solve these problems. At the core of the problem of getting people related data to move is - Identity. This is what IDentity Commons is all supporting a community of groups addressing the range of issues (technical, social and legal) that come up. http://wiki.idcommons.net/i...

I am VERY hopeful that the face to face opportunity to meet at the Data Sharing Summit will move things forward significantly. http://www.datasharingsummi... - I hope you and other deeply concerned about getting this problem solved can come - there is nothing like a white board and and a real live face to face conversation to make progress on difficult issues.

The event is being run in the tradition of the Internet Identity Workshop that has been instrumental in progress in that realm. http://iiw.idcommons.net

Re: The real roadblocks to data portability on social networks

Brian Hanafee — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 15:45:12 -0000

DataPortability.org won't work because they aren't solving the biggest problem -- and probably can't. Just look at their FAQ - it breaks the problem into vendors, consumers, and standards and technology. They're skirting around the real problem, which is lack of a consistent data model. Absent that, data portability inevitably encounters impedence mismatches at every translation point as different sites try to use the data for different purposes.

Look at a really core example: person. If you look in a law book, the flesh and blood you will find that there are different concepts of person. You as a reader of this blog are a natural person or, at least for our purposes. A "legal person" can also be, for example, a corporation, a trustee, a partnership, etc.. So, a single natural person can have a wide variety of relationships and types of relationships with any number of legal persons. In fact, persons in general can have a wide variety of relationships with other persons; natural persons are just a special case. Data portability has to consider:

* Relationships between people and other people (natural or otherwise).
* Trust relationships between people.
* Transitivity of those relationships.

Now add back the reality of an online identity. Identity is not a person. It's the handle to interact with a system. Data portability is based on the idea that if "you" just had a portable identity, problems would be solved. The misguided assumption is that multiple identities are just an artifact of using computers, and that it's a problem that goes away in the real world. It doesn't. Identity is just a handle that ties some identifier such as "robertscoble" to some person, with some degree of confidence. So now the question is which person should it tie to? Robert Scoble? Scobleizer? Is Scobleizer more useful as an identity or as a "person" in it's own right? What relationship does either of those "people" have to the real Rober Scoble? Do you really want those tied to the same person as your birth certificate, passport and IRS records? Would you want that ability if, for example, somebody started publishing as "Scobleizer" on some other blog? If not, how could any of those identities legitimately be called yours? The boundary between you and your online presence is fuzzy. That adds to the data portability problem:

* Relationships between authentication techniques (passwords, etc.) and identities.
* Confidence in those relationships.
* Transitivity of the confidence across systems that are themselves authenticated to varying degrees of confidence.
* Relationships between identities and people.
* Trust between people and the sites that use the identities.

Whatever movement we get this year will have to be very careful about which part of the problem they try to solve. OpenId has done a really good job of making clear what pieces it solves and which it doesn't. It doesn't solve a lot of things, but at least acknowledges as much. I'm not so sure that DataPortability.org has yet established exactly where their boundaries are and should be.

Re: The real roadblocks to data portability on social networks

Andrew Feinberg — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 09:44:06 -0000

Robert,

Facebook has officially given the finger on Data Portabilty.

I've been emailing their corporate communications coordinator back and forth asking why/when/how the "export to CSV" feature was deleted. I asked if there was someone with institutional knowledge and expertise on the history of the system to know, and was told that there isn't such a person.

*cough*bullshit*cough*

Isn't it just easier to tell the truth?

Re: The real roadblocks to data portability on social networks

Matt Galligan — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 21:08:18 -0000

Robert, I think your point #3 is excellent, and is actually something that we've been working on for a long time here at Socialthing! I'd love to get a conversation going with you to talk about what you would specifically like to see.

If you can, email me at matt at socialthing dot com...

Re: The real roadblocks to data portability on social networks

Prokofy — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 19:42:39 -0000

I'm glad the Facebook guy was able to cramp your data portability extremism a little bit into some pragmatic considerations that aren't just other people's privacy, which is something you may not care about, but raise just data *management* issues, like the problem of software you can't leave because it keeps spraying your info everywhere.

What I dislike about this discussion is the horrid artificial problem created out of thin air, which then is mounted as a thing needing a "solution".

And that problem is an imaginary one, where tekkies who don't like typing their handles and passwords 10 times over are inconvenienced.

It's simply hard to see that as a problem. Who cares?! You can solve the problem by making your handle and password the same everywhere, which shouldn't matter on these dollar-a-dozen social networks that come and go, and aren't involving monetary transactions but only chat.

Surely some of them will die off and only a few stronger ones will survive and/or be bought out. So why fuss about your inability to port your friendz from Wikitikiwoo.com to Rinkydinki.net when both of them will become extinct by next year?

I also don't like the idea of having some social-mark-up that might inevitably enable some entity to have all your social data centralized somewhere under the guise of open-source and under the guise of you being to manage and apportion it out to this or that social network.

At some point, the places that exist on the Internet that you will be "on" aren't going to be the places anymore, such that you have to sign up for them.

The place you will be "on" will be your phone, with its unique number and password. Obviously you'll control what you want to be on that mobile phone yourself, linked to that number and password. You won't need any hand-holding from any opensourced wikitarian to do this.

And that phone will then access all the stuff out there and maybe not even bother to log in anymore -- why should it? it won't need to. The websites will be the connecting spaces between phones.

Yes, there will be multiple phone services that will not have interoperability. Good!

Re: The real roadblocks to data portability on social networks

Johannes — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 14:20:45 -0000

There are so many open questions (as described), and we are "just" talking about DATA portability. What if meaning comes into play (portable ontologies)? One question is "what exists?", another is "what is/shall be transfered?". Things are not getting easier...

Re: The real roadblocks to data portability on social networks

Matthew Warren — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 11:10:36 -0000

What do we call these facebook like social networking applications?

well, how about snaps?

Re: The real roadblocks to data portability on social networks

David Evans — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 09:22:09 -0000

What ever happened to the discussion about multiple encrypted databases that contain our information, which is cached for a certain period of time. Commenter 41 is talking about that. Sort of like DNS root servers and TTL settings. Bidirectional propagation is tough, so push everything back to the mothership, then push it out to other services. Dealing with diffs between what you want displayed on various services is going to be tough.

Perhaps the signup process will be more along the lines of "put checks next to all the data you want to be made public."

Re: The real roadblocks to data portability on social networks

danja — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 07:13:53 -0000

Tom says in the first comment: "...vendors will jump in front of the parade and start preaching openness when it becomes inevitable" - it has and they are.

The actions are slower than the word, but still, one bite at a time.

My biggest worry in all of this is that we'll wind up with poorly thought-out hacks solving the immediate problem, without considering the bigger picture - the more general Web of Data (where the standards are already in place, the Semantic Web stack).

Fortunately the DataPortability folks seem relatively sane :-)

Re: The real roadblocks to data portability on social networks

John Breslin — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 06:38:36 -0000

[10:33:03] John Breslin says: despite all the difficult scenarios (mainly in terms of ownership), you should still be able to bring your profile and your content with you
[10:33:25] John Breslin says: even without comments, tags, etc. (if they "belong" to other people)
[10:34:06] John Breslin says: the stuff "belonging" to others could still be ported depending on a profile option for those users on the old/new sites
[10:34:40] John Breslin says: "Yes, let my friends port objects that connect us together from this site." / "Yes, let my friends port objects that connect us together to this site."

Re: The real roadblocks to data portability on social networks

gregorys — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 06:01:56 -0000

Robert, do you speaking about something like this
http://blogs.zdnet.com/micr... ?

Re: The real roadblocks to data portability on social networks

shaidorsai — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 05:04:28 -0000

I'm surprised that the use case quoted were seen as something not thought about.

The data portability working group have been looking at examples like that since the get go.

I touched on data ownership in http://shaidorsai.wordpress...
and said then that it was something we needed to get under. JP's talked about several times, refered to in that post.

Worried about your content? Stick a creative commons licence on it, if you want attribution and so on. That'll make your intentions *clear*. It won't stop thieves, but at least your wishes are explicit.

Re: The real roadblocks to data portability on social networks

saran — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 22:02:31 -0000

the google wow begins :)

Re: The real roadblocks to data portability on social networks

macbeach — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 21:31:49 -0000

I don't know if the guy you talked to at Facebook is a real technical guy or just someone with a fancy title. Two things stood out for me in your message and in his response:

I think Open ID is an important part of this. Open ID does not require every product I use to keep a copy of my ID and password, but whatever system I use as my authentication server must have a high degree of uptime and responsiveness to validate me to all the others.

Why can't my address list be housed on Google if I use that most for e-mail, or Yahoo if I use that, and available in real time to any service I've authorized to use it? You seem to be thinking in terms of every service copying all of my accumulated data when I first sign up. I'm quite sure the Facebook guy was thrilled to tell you how impractical that would be. I can just imagine him saying that RSS was impossible as it would require every player to maintain an entire copy of the Internet! Once people join these walled garden companies they can't think straight any more (if they ever could).

Oh a third thing... for data that DOES need to be copied from one service to another, all you need is a standard for defining a "delete transaction" or some more generic transaction mechanism to keep them all in sync without constant copying. And in the case that someone asked above of you changing your e-mail address to different things on several services (assuming you e-mail address was being used as the common linkage) then you would simply be breaking the connection at that point. I don't see anything wrong with that, if that's what you want to do. Maybe there could (and should) even be a way of linking two pre-existing accounts when new services hop on the bandwagon. I would hope so.

Facebook is dragging its heels for purely non-technical reasons, and they make themselves look progressively sillier with every new attempt.

Re: The real roadblocks to data portability on social networks

Chris Saad — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 18:18:30 -0000

@Christian - agreed, that's why the DP discussion exists - to discuss these tricky use cases and solve them.

Facebook is not unique in having these problems, and the answers *are* being discussed - good answers.

Re: The real roadblocks to data portability on social networks

Andrew — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 18:06:18 -0000

I envision data "portability" as just that, your info moving where you do. In the browser. Think a robots.txt file meets cookies where I decide who gets what level of information and how the relationships are mapped.

I simple "handshake" with a new website would allow them to see where else I share similar info, who I relate to and even (cringe) serve me relevant ads.
This could be expanded to all levels of customization or preferences for web use.

One config file to rule them all?

Re: The real roadblocks to data portability on social networks

Christian Scholz — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 17:11:09 -0000

Yes, these are all hard problems and maybe not all of them can be addresses in a matter that everybody is happy.

So my vision is also to have one social network which is the internet but not as one master server for everybody but following the OpenID model (I think this goes into the direction Sam was thinking). So this can be easily used to sync data. If you change your email address 3 times then the last one should be valid unless you state that you want to use another profile (with a different address) on some social application (if we have one social network the existing ones might then be called social applications making use of that network).

So everybody can actually choose their master server of choice (some might trust Facebook, some might trust their bank, some their own hosted thing) and you give permissions around.

Of course this is not fully thought through but it might be one idea to think further.

The thing is though that "Data Portability" can be sort of everything or nothing depending on who you ask. This email problem is more a problem of sync and sync is probably one of the most difficult to solve. I would already be happy if we would solve the export issue, defining technical standards and policy for exporting data (and policies which you are allowed to do with it).

I summarized some ideas of how to partition the problem space here: http://mrtopf.de/blog/web20... and during the last DP meeting a similar idea seems to have been discussed in the form of DP labs. I think the main problem which stops the actual work in DP right now is really not having a defined scope (maybe narrow enough to being able to solve it).

Another thing I would like though would be that Dave Morin joins the conversation on one of the Data Portability Groups or even lists these use cases in the wiki so people can think about it. I mean FB joined this project so it would be good to know what the problems they are facing are. Both on the user and on the business side.

Re: The real roadblocks to data portability on social networks

Alexander van Elsas — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 16:14:23 -0000

Well, a not so obvious solution to many of these problems would be to leave all data where it belongs. With the user. No need for data portability then. Only a simple agreement on how a user would identify himself to a service that he wishes to make use of (even temporary). If you put the user in charge and let him decide which info he shares with others and which not, it would put most current web 2.0 walled garden social graph data hogging services out of business. We would get a user centric web. A web where you are in charge of your own interactions with others. And social networks would simply become means to interact. I could use any means I want as I have my friends with me.