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Google and Facebook Join DataPortability.org
technirvana sends us to ReadWriteWeb for the scoop on the announcement this morning that representatives from Google and Facebook are joining the DataPortability Workgroup. Quoting: "The group is working on a variety of projects to foster an era in which users can take their data from the websites they use to reuse elsewhere... Good bye customer lock-in, hello to new privacy challenges. If things go right, today could be a very important day in the history of the internet. The non-participation of Google and Facebook, two companies that hold more user data and do more with it than almost any other consumer service on the market, was the biggest stumbling block to the viability of the project. These are two of the most important companies in recent history — what's being decided now is whether they will be walled-garden, data-horders or truly open platforms tied into a larger ecosystem of innovation with respect for user rights and sensible policies about data."
"Walled-garden, data horders"???
Nothing like emotional polarization rather than rational discussion. Is the poster running for president or something?
Despite the obvious gold treasure room that has now been created for spammers, hackers etc. etc., I look forward to this. It'll be nice being able to use a universal account online. It will be interesting as well, as I think we'll see more and more that people are going to be known by their avatars rather than their actual name as data becomes universal like this.
They're are just looking to a create a standard format to make it that much easier to sell all that information to data brokers...
Most of the data people want to move around has obvious formats, and where there aren't obvious formats, the first people to do something reasonable get to set the standard. What are some of the things Google and Facebook can do right now?
There are commonly used formats for contact info, addresses, appointments, todo lists, notes, and bookmarks. For images, Google could offer downloading of a zip of an album or all albums. For documents and document backup, Google could offer downloading of a zip of a folder or the entire collection. Mail can be backed up via IMAP pretty well, but a zipped mbox file might also be nice. For information in search results and other web pages, Google could use microformats.
So, talk if you like, but these companies can do a lot better than they are doing right now without waiting for some grand standard or consensus.
you're kidding right? Microsoft would never have that.
Does Amazon participate in this? They hold a ton of personal data whenever I make a purchase from them. Hell, whenever I sign into their site they keep track of all the items I have ever viewed.
It seems that there are so many ways for a website to get *my* data.
(a) personal data supplied (forms on their site that I fill in),
(b) friend data supplied (form on their site that my friend fills in),
(c) browsing data semi-supplied (pages on their site that I look at),
(d) 3rd party supplied data, (forms on other sites that I filled in)
If all of these data sources cannot be controlled by the end user (what gets aggregated where)... then I am going to have to find myself another Internet.
And yes, I don't like that Facebook gets personal data from 3rd Party Sites unless I specifically say they can (i.e. "Go Search Gmail for New Contacts to Add"). LinkedIn (I believe) does this search without asking you.
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True, but we don't really need Microsoft either. I just need a stack of hardware and software that actually cooperates. If Microsoft is not involved, so much the better.
TWO? No. Not even close. Google sure -- they have lots of user data and are surely important in the recent history of the Web. But Facebook isn't even the biggest in its own field. Love it or hate it, Myspace still has many, many more users and much more influence. They may still be drowning in OMG Ponies!!!1! glitter, but they have the backing of one of the worlds biggest (and scariest) media empires.
Facebook is in all likelihood little more than a fad. They're not ground breaking, nor especially innovative, they are not leaders in their field (unless, maybe, you could user protest and rebellion figures).
Thus, my conclusion is that this "article" was brought to you (at least indirectly) by the Marketing Droids over at Facebook.
That said, the principle of portable data and removal of proprietary walled gardens is certainly a good thing.
Basically facebook is already two-faced, so their participation in this seems like it could be a mission to slow/derail/control development. Yesterday's article on facebook banning those who use aggregators from their site (with user permission) is just one example of where facebook does one thing and demands another.
In addition to one-sided policies, facebook has a feature system that requires you to give full access to any application any of your friends is using/spamming you with--just to receive their message. Every time I get a message on that site I am required to add the application and check 4 boxes giving full access to my information (there is no middle road) in order to read the message.
Facebook's privacy functionality is completely unacceptable to me but seems okay with the huge numbers of folks adding 3 feet of application on their profiles. Sadly, I suspect facebook is not a fad, but instead a new and more obnoxious myspace with even less privacy controls--and a poorer track record.
oops. that was a rant.
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Google and Facebook join forces to sell your data for money.
Not Meta-modding due to apathy.
Wait there. To be fair you can export data from Outlook. Outlook will let you export your address book, mail and calendar, Google will not. Google will let you download all of your mail, but there is nothing for exporting your address book. (And to be fair, you really don't have a Google address book do you? It just caches the names of everyone and uses an autocomplete feature to make it feel like you do.)
I keep a Google Calendar for personal stuff and one in Outlook at work for scheduled meetings and so forth (Fortune 500, so I can't just tell everyone I'm not going to use Outlook anymore). Once I decided to export my Outlook calendar and import it into Google's so I could see my upcoming meetings from home later that day and plan my next month's schedule. Worked great, no problem at all. Then about a week later I decided to do the same thing backwards, export from Google and load that data into Outlook. Well, Google offers no such feature. I *could* "share" my personal calendar (give it an address that anyone can view) and import it that way, but I don't like the idea of making my calendar viewable to the world while I do the import.
And this is coming from a Google fan who has four Google related Firefox Prizm icons on his desktop (Gmail, Calendar, Reader and Docs).
Get your Unix fortune now!
Want to use Outlook? Good luck sharing your address book with Gmail or (hah) Thunderbird
Gosh, I must be extremely lucky; I typed "export contacts" in Outlook help, and, what do you know, I got a link to an article helpfully named "Transfer contacts between Outlook and Google Gmail". Just export your Outlook contact list as a CSV file and import it into GMail. Trivial.
This is precisely the idea behind i-names - sort of OpenIDs, but relying on an external database and not the DNS.
However, the business i-name for google hasn't been even registered yet... So I believe that the chances of i-names widespread adoption are pretty low.
Normal Internet users tend to rely on things that just work for them and find it too troublesome to set up complicated things like i-names (what's perfectly understandable). Unless any global IT corporation or government implements i-names and so forces their clients/citizens to use it, we won't probably see any of those utopian systems like i-names in action...
I don't think TFA is being fair in its language when describing the possibilities of the DataPortability Workgroup becoming "walled-garden data-horders" or "truly open platforms". It somehow implies that the Alliance is more capable of governing the organization in a way that allows for an open trading of information. I'll let them know that our use of the Goblin Zeppelin technology is much more cost-effective and flexible than their under-ground tram system between Stormwind and Ironforge.
Oh, they meant data-hoArders?
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Good for you. What are you going to do when one of them changes? Oh that's right, you're screwed. You don't want duplicates? Want to have a third address book? You don't want to manually have to maintain two or more address books? Have fun with your CSV files and manual updates.
Of course you have been able to import and export since time immemorial. That's almost USELESS after the first time, not to mention a pain in the ass. I was talking about synchronization, not import/export. Import/export is only a solution for someone with a very small address book or WAY too much time on their hands.
I'm not talking about import/export, I'm talking about synchronization. Import/export is only useful for a one time bulk transfer. Change anything after that and you have a mess on your hands. If you have more than a handful of contact information import/export is useless on an ongoing basis. There is no fundamental technological reason why address books cannot synchronize. No, the reasons are almost entirely based on attempts at platform lock in. Just like the Microsoft Office file formats keep people using Word and Excel, making it a pain in the ass to synchronize contact info in your address book from Outlook to Thunderbird (or any other two address book dependent apps) tends to keep people using that application. Hence Microsoft and Google have little incentive to actually share the data that would make updating my Palm Tungsten or Nokia phone or Thunderbird address books actually easy.
Calendar sharing admittedly has gotten better recently (largely thanks to
Of course but not by choice. I'd really like Google's contact list to synchronize with Thunderbird's address book (or outlook, or pine, or {insert favorite email app here} ) not to mention some of my hardware devices like my phone.
As Mark Pilgrim said, "Praising companies for providing APIs to get your own data out is like praising auto companies for not filling your airbags with gravel." It's depressing that this isn't all a given.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Has anyone read "The Scoble scuffle: Facebook, Plaxo at odds over data portability" (http://www.news.com/8301-13577_3-9839474-36.html); why would Facebook join this, if they are doing something else like in the aforementioned story which I think you should all read!
Michael
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If you've got Outlook 2007, you can add the private ICS link (see under Settings, calendars, sharing settings or something like that) to your Outlook 2007 Account Settings as an internet calendar. Then, after it's loaded it, do an Advanced Find -> Find all -> Copy all to outlook calendar. You'll get duplicates this way, though.
. Define sqrt(x) as something really evil like (x / rand()), and bury it deep. Watch your coworkers go nuts.
Hoarders may get piles of money,
That is true, hackers, that is true.
But they cannot help their neighbors;
That's not good, hackers, that's not good.
One little-noted consequence of this move is that Google and Facebook are now optimally positioned to help their neighbors -- they are no longer bad (i.e. "not good").
Am I missing something? My Gmail account has an address book, which I recently exported to two different formats.
Finally I would be able to move my fake profiles with ease .. heh heh
It's easy to advocate open data standards when you believe it will allow hordes of new customers to abandon your competitors offerings and flock to your products.
Actually, this is probably why MS does not go for them. If they really believed in the quality of their products, they would be a sincere advocate of open standards.
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I used to write software that tried to read data from Outlook exports. The amount of idiotic design decisions and strange errors in the file formats was so high that it was quite hard to attribute it to just incompetence*. Add to that the fact that the export file formats seemed to change ever so slightly on every Outlook version, and it became pretty obvious that keeping people from actually exporting things is a priority at Microsoft (or at least was, like I said this happened several years ago).
As a more recent anecdote, I tried to help my dad move his addressbook from MS Outlook on one machine to MS Mail on another... After several hours of work we gave up. It just didn't work (and Google tells me it doesn't work for others either, so it wasn't just my ineptitude with Windows).
*) One example: the calendar CSV export
- columns are identified only by column names on the first row
- column names are localized (yes, a localized export file)
- column order is slightly different on every Outlook version so that can't be used to identify columns
The result: a machine-unreadable file format.
Bonus points for the "Lawrence Lessig" presentation style too... :-)
As technology accumulates, the hatred between people tends to decrease. - Steven Pinker
Google Calendar has a synchronization API. I use it to synchronize my mobile phone calendar with my calendar at Google.
I don't know whether or not someone has written a plugin to make Outlook support this protocol, but there's nothing at Google's end stopping them from doing so.
... does this mean that if I'm on Orkut, I'll be able to add a friend whose on Facebook, and interact with them flawlessly? If not, then this is just a distraction to what social networking should look like.
If delivery of messages were contingent on the recipient's authorization rather like some instant messaging systems are today, the worst you might see is a constant flow of authorization requests which would be as annoying as direct spam, but could be presented to the user in some digest form on a periodic basis for their review rather than in the form of millions of little requests. Then the recipient could allow the sender's messages through based on their opt-in selection which could be revoked one the user's request.
the chances are that someone else already thought of it and implemented it 10 years ago.
Internet Mail 2000 is a new Internet mail architecture proposed by Daniel J. Bernstein (and in subsequent years separately proposed by several others), designed with the precept that the initial storage of mail messages be the responsibility of the sender, and not of the recipient as it is with the SMTP-based Internet mail architecture.
The upside to that is that people are likely to take their reputation more seriously, in a truly 'Global Community' sense. I suspect you'd see a drop in the amount of trolling and similar antisocial behavior, for instance.
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