Running Scoble’s Roadblocks on Data Portability

Top bloglebrity Robert Scoble has long been a proponent of data portability on social network sites. He’s a heavy user of many social sites and was famously booted from Facebook when he ran a script to extract his friend’s data. He recently posted about the roadblocks to data portability that raised some good points and I’d like to see if I can address them through my distributed/open/inside out social network idea.

Scoble’s proposed solution to the issues with multiple closed social networks is fundamentally different from mine. He (and this isn’t just Scoble I’m just using him to represent this camp) proposes data portability which means data that you enter on one site would be able to migrate to other sites. Update your profile picture on Facebook and that change would propagate to MySpace. Follow someone on Twitter and also “friend” them on Facebook.

My plan is a bit different in that I don’t distribute the data to be hosted by the various sites you use. I have a profile provider which gives the data to a profile consumer on demand and based on the credentials of the profile viewer. It’s OpenID on steroids. You want to update your profile picture so you go to your profile provider site - say Facebook - and update it. You also have pictures posted on Flickr. When someone visits your Flickr profile, Flickr software - under the covers - requests your profile information from Facebook using the credentials of the viewer - in this case it might be an anonymous unregistered user. Facebook then sends to Flickr the profile information you have marked as publicly available - which includes your new profile picture.

Would this scheme solve the problems that Scoble and his Facebook engineer friend raise? Lets look at them and see.

Multiple Profiles

credit: Arkansas ShutterBugThe first problem that Scoble raises that he’s trying to solve is the issue of having multiple profiles across many sites and the pain that causes when you try to update profile information. “this year I wanted to change my email … Doing just that simple action is a pain in the behind.” In my scheme it’s a piece of cake. You don’t have profiles on the dozens of sites you use you have one at your profile provider site. Change your e-mail there and it’s automagically changed everywhere

From Facebook to Email

“When a Facebook user … gives you his/her email address it’d be nice to have that automatically placed into your favorite email client”. Not quite automatically placed in your email client but automatically available to your email client. You login to Gmail using your profile and therefor your profile’s contacts are available within Gmail.

Friend Discovery

When you visit a new social networking site you need to find which of your friends are also using that site. No longer. Under this scheme your relationships are cross site. A Facebook user is able to friend a MySpace user. And if both of those users are on Twitter they are automatically friended there. They way it works is this:

• Every user has a unique id based on their profile provider - could be the url to your Facebook profile
• When you sign in to a new site you sign in via your profile information ala OpenID
• That site - the profile consumer - requests all your information from the profile provider which includes your list of friends
• The new site now automagically knows about all your relationships and can connect you with those who are also users

What exactly consumer sites do with your relationship information would be up to the sites (and the user). You might determine that you really don’t want to follow all of your Facebook friends on Twitter so Twitter might instead present you with a list of your friends who are also Facebook users and allow you to chose which to follow.

The Low Hanging Fruit

So far I’ve addressed - I think successfully - the problems that Scoble is trying to solve via data portability but in this different distributed profile way. That’s not a huge accomplishment though since data portability Scoble’s way also solves these same problems. Next time I see if I can address the issues that Facebook raised along with some new issues that arise out of this distributed scheme.