Data Portability has been in the news a lot over the last few months, with many wondering just what the heck it is and when a concrete application of it would be in evidence. now MySpace, eBay, Yahoo (and its properties), Twitter and PhotoBucket have all teamed up to give Data Portability functionality its first real world launch.

What is Data Portability? It is a web movement and social site feature based on the notion that you should own and control your data. This means that if you have 550 friends in MySpace and you join another social media application, with Data Portability you would be able to simply port them over to the new service, having it automatically add any already using it. Up until now you have had to search out your friends manually, over and over again on each social site, as each social site treats your friend list as proprietary data, along with your profile and other info.

To have such a list of popular social media heavy hitters do a simultaneous feature launch is huge (assuming it works as planned). Had only one or two of the companies launched Data Portability it would have meant nothing – what goes is being able to port your data if you have nowhere to port it to? Having many of the most popular social media sites begin using the feature all at once means that it may actually find some success with the average web user who doesn’t follow behind the scenes debates like the one that has been raging over Data Portability.

Notably absent is social network FaceBook. FaceBook came under fire earlier this year for its Beacon advertising and data sharing debacle and for shutting down the accounts of industry heavy hitters like Scoble when they tried to port friends from one place to another. FaceBook is also under the gun for limiting the number of friends a user can have, meaning someone like Gary Vaynerchuk of WineLibraryTV fame is capped at 5,000 friends when he has another 8,000 friend requests pending (and counting).

Data Portability will be popular with the average internet user because it will save you time. Once it is integrated, you will no longer have to spend hours each time you try a new social site looking for and adding your friends, messing with profile setting and otherwise tweaking. A few simple clicks and you can actually go play with the new toy instead, right out of the starting gate. It is popular with tech heads because of what it means for interconnectivity in social media – it is an important step toward a true network covering the majority of the social web.

This is vindication for people like Chris Saad, long an ambassador of Data Portability. In fact, he was such an ambassador for the concept that he was making people all over Twitter and other sites irritated at the number of times he spoke about Data Portability instead of his own creation, Particls (which also uses Data Portability concepts). Now Saad and others may get a chance to have the last laugh at all the people who called them noisy. To see details on when and how each company plans to integrate Data Portability, visit the press release here.

Related:

Entry was posted on Thursday, May 8th, 2008 at 4:36 pm under Uncategorized.

Read more entries by Leslie Poston.
Stumble It!