Google and Facebook Pledge Data Portability

Google, Facebook and Plaxo have joined the DataPortability Workgroup, pledging to allow users to export their contacts from one social network to another. Facebook has been particularly bad in this regard, hijacking your data and not letting you export it, as witnessed when Robert Scoble tried to export his data to Plaxo and had his account shut down for a few days. With these companies joining up, their pledging to do better by their users, and that’s good news for everyone.
Whether Facebook makes available usable data or just the basics is a big question. Currently, there are Facebook-approved methods for applications to pull data out of Facebook, but they are not given enough access to be usable. Usually, you get the picture, the name, and a tiny sliver of actual data. Hopefully, Facebook lets you pull out enough data that switching social networks is as […]

Original post by Nathan Weinberg