Social Data Portability
Yesterday I was out with two friends and we talked a lot about the computer industry. Of course on of the topics we discussed was the social web we are living at the moment. I mentioned that we have to maintain several profiles on the different social sites and that it would be nice to have just one centralized profile where you can decide which information goes to which channel. Of course Google did some step in this direction about two months ago when they introduced Open Social but for me the ‘standard’ they introduced is far away form what we need. After some discussion we identified two main fields we need to have in the future to be able to maintain just one profile and distribute the information.
- Authentication
There need to be a mechanism for Single Sign on to different Social Sites. I mentioned OpenId some posts ago which would provide such functionality - Centralized Data Management
At the moment User don’t care that there information is distributed over several Sites and Content providers but if you have to maintain more than one profile (e.g. you change your job or your hometown) things become difficult. First of all you don’t remember all the sites you signed up for but believe me some of your friends will and will complain that the couldn’t find the information that you have changed your job. On the other hand maintaining your profile is fare to much work (in my opinion).
An other important point for centralized data is that you can’t trust ever provider to take care of your data. And some have build up amazing profiles on websites they don’t want to loose. The amusing part here is that I read about this issues we discussed yesterday in an posting from Robert Scoble about ‘Facebook disabled my account‘. Of course they just disabled the account and he will get his profile back, I’m sure about it, but in the end there can be situations where you will not. The nice thing about it is that he point’s in his post to DataPortability.org an community that tries to use protocols and ‘standards’ out there to give user the possibility to use an system I described above.
Let’s see what the future will bring, I am just tired to maintain my profiles:
Blog, Website, Xing, Google Profile, Facebook, StudiVZ, …..
