Take a peek at dataportability.org and you’ll see some innocent looking logos and acronyms splashed across the bottom. Pay close attention, those little logos (each represents a different open standard) are improving the web in a very, very big way.
You’ve no doubt heard of RSS by now. You may have seen OPML before If you use a feed aggregator like Google Reader. But what about the rest of those? OpenID? OAuth? Microformats? APML? WTF?
If all goes well, you’ll hear more about some of them in the next 2-3 years. And some of them, like OAuth, you’ll never hear about at all, even when they’re widely adopted.
Here’s just a taste of what data portability will mean for you:
No More Registration
Say goodbye to filling out Yet Another Registration Form. You’ve (probably) already given this over to Yahoo! and Google once. Eventually this will be the only login/password you’ll have to remember.
Yahoo! is an OpenID provider, meaning other sites that consume OpenIDs can be pretty confident that your Yahoo! ID actually IS you and skip the registration step.
But Yahoo!/Google don’t own OpenID… they’re simply examples of big players that are electing to conform to the standard.
Your Friends List Available Everywhere
Building up a friend’s list is fun… the first time. It get’s a little annoying adding friends in Facebook, and then adding the same people again in Linkedin, and then again in Last.fm. Eventually you won’t have to repeat this process for all of your hundreds|thousands of friends.
Social networks like Facebook and Linkedin will eventually start annotating your friends list with XFN (XHTML Friends Network) data that makes it really easy for a web crawler to identify connections between people.
Now if only Google would recognize XFN and do something with it, right? Well, they do. I recently added XFN data to my blogroll… the next time Google crawls this page, you’ll see my connections show up with a query to their Social Graph API. This is only a one-way connection, which is not very reliable. A two-way connection in which a friend also identifies me as a friend with XFN is considered very reliable.
So, the next time I join the next hot social web site, call it MyFace.fm, I can skip the cumbersome friend add/confirm nonsense. MyFace.fm can just query Google’s Social Graph API and find all of my relationship data.
Your Preferences Available Everywhere (As you like it)
Amazon knows a lot about me… especially the books and DVDs I’ve bought. Last.fm also knows thousands of songs that I really like. Now, suppose I signed up for a dating site out there that uses books, music, and movie preferences to find my soul mate. Should I have to teach this new site all of my preferences again?
Even though I’ve invested years providing Last.fm and Amazon with my preferences, that data is locked up in those two silos. In order to give this dating site my preferences, I’m again forced to duplicate my efforts because my preference data is not portable.
Enter APML (Attention Profiling Markup Language). If Amazon and Last.fm published APML files of my preferences, and the dating site could consume APML feeds, it would be easy! I would just copy-paste two URLs and boom, I’ve found my future wife.
But hang on, even if it may lead to domestic bliss, I don’t necessarily want Amazon and Last.fm to publish my data out in the open. I don’t really want the whole world knowiing that I am a raging Carrie Underwood fan… (I’m not really… or am I?). I want to choose which sites can access my sensitive preference data without having to hand over my Amazon password.
That’s where OAuth comes in. OAuth will let me grant the dating site limited access to my Amazon APML file, so I can share it in a safe way.
The Bottom Line
Open standards will free your data from the clutches of a single site or company. Your data will distributed across the web in a safe and portable way… everywhere, but nowhere in particular.
