Picking up on a meme
The Data portability announcements that were made over the last few days all had their fare share of relevance. But what interested me is how important DNA seems to be for companies. We have on the one hand MySpace and Facebook who both tries to build a proprietary product packaged with an tag line of openness, on the other hand we have Google who understands the distribution and takes a way more open stance in their announcement.
The MySpace platform surely adopts the open trend in new ways, but still have the true ambition of being the central platform for peoples identities. By letting other services tap into the data of MySpace they promote the portability but Dan Farber notes the difference between saying open and being open:
In the MySpace “Data Availability” model, the user can take their data for a walk anytime they want or to any place they want, but the data remains on a tether. There is no notion of copy, move, or sync. Participating sites must agree to have MySpace serve the data live in their page. That’s a half-step wrapped in a beautiful flag of openness.
Google’s initiative takes off in a way more distributed and open ambition. Starting with having three, kind of, open standards as their core, oAuth - OpenID - OpenSocial. Trying to attack both MySpace and Facebook with an even more open approach is a way for Google to disrupt without risking to loose anything.
Not saying that either Google or MySpace is really embracing the DataPortability vision with these products but I would say that Google’s approach, once again, is an evidence of their DNA. Understanding that they will never be the proprietary owner of an identity but instead supporting the open infrastructure and striving to create products and services that are great enough for people to use and then loosely connecting them with each other. Hence creating even greater value, they have a much better chance of delivering a more sustainable social architecture than the traditional, old-school thinking companies MySpace and Facebook.
While on the subject of Data portability I highly recommend Chris Messina’s post about it, not because I agree with everything but because he highlights the complexity of the problem.
Bloggar.se: facebook, myspace, google, open social, oauth, dna, social media
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