Zude and Data Portability

Who owns your data on the web? The answer, apparently, depends on who you ask.

I mean, YOU invest the time and effort to create your electronic persona on the web, including your profile, pics, friends, events, and activities – and the question is: is it really yours? Some social networking sites think otherwise.

But of course it’s yours! After all, they’re YOUR friends, and profile, and pics, and everything else, but try telling that to Facebook. Tell them you want to move some of YOUR data elsewhere or share it with another site. Good luck (BTW, this isn’t about picking on Facebook – they just happen to be the lightning rod at the moment!).

There are initiatives out there attempting to deal with this: the two most visible are Google’s OpenSocial and the larger Data Portability initiative (www.dataportability.org). The latter is an open consortium advocating data portability for the user and standardization for the developer. I say larger (even “bigger” than Google) because of its opportunity to so radically affect every day interaction with the web. In general, both initiatives are designed to make user data more portable as well as to bring standards to an otherwise free-form arena.

A number of companies have recently announced support for one or the other of the initiatives, or both, and we hope we will soon start seeing the benefits from these efforts.

Recently, social computing provider Zude, the company I work for, released global support for both the OpenSocial protocol as well as a major component of Data Portability, with more than 60 variants of user-centric source/format data, including XML, JSON, delimited, name/value, hCard, and vCard.

This is a start – both for Zude and the rest of the players out there. But even this is not enough. This is important stuff and while it certainly needs continued technological leadership and innovation, it also needs participation and activism.

So, the next time you ask whose data it is, stand up and do something about.