Letz say I regularly hang out in a bar with my friends. Letz say I also make a few friends in that bar. After some time, I want to go to another bar with my friends just for the heck of it or because the bartender in that bar had spit on my booze. If the bar manager says that I can only socialize with my friends in his bar and not take them with me to another bar, does it sound reasonable? Hell no. As long as my friends don’t mind me taking them to another bar, I have every right to take them along. Bar manager or, for that matter, government cannot tell me how and where I should socialize with my friends.

Data Portability in the case of social networks is also analogous to the above example. Facebook or any other social network cannot tell me that I cannot take my friends with me when I leave their social network. Only my friends can tell me if they want to come along or not. The social networks should allow me to take my data with me and also offer my friends a mechanism to say whether they want to come with me or not. As simple as that.

When it comes to privacy on the net the main point is don’t share any information you are not willing to let anyone see, no matter where it is or how safe it is. But how we share that information is something that these concepts can allow to be done much easily.

For instance I wished I could spread my comments from this site to your linked article on your blog. There is already too many linked articles and comments that are going to waste without a shared system like Eric Atkins (above) was talking about.

The more I learn about DataPortability, the more warped
the concept seems to me. About the walled garden: You should
indeed not be forced to fork your data over to the many
application providers and then be at their mercy. The ability to
migrate your (?) data from one application to another is just
spreading the problem to different ‘gardens’. I was expecting a
total different sort of initiative altogether, one that seems
much more logical (at least to me).

In my view, your data should just be your data (about you),
molded in your own fashion and stored on a provider of your
choice; no application is involved at this point, it’s just a
generic data store, so that’s pretty useless by itself (Oh
really?). However, once there is a generic way to precisely
address and disclose bits of your data to other
identities (such as your friends or application providers), things will happen.
Application providers which are allowed to read your data can provide fun and meaningful ways to interact with your data, and that of others. They don’t own it, they just fetch it when needed,
like you fetch a web page when you need it. (They could cache it,
but if its dynamic data, that’s of no use. Moreover, why cache if
you can fetch anytime again and again whenever they need?).

So, my ideal world view is a bit different, I suppose. My data is
designed and stored the way I want it. I can disclose bits of it
to application providers and other people.

To get there, things need to be built that do not exist yet, but
they are founded on top of well-known concepts. Addressable
resources (like http://my.dataserver.com/first/name) are
feasible. (maybe it wouldn’t be http but something else). Semantic agreement and disclosure (or not) on a property by
property basis between two identities is sort of new, but there’s
a lot of stuff out there that could be used.

In this situation, applications would use your data, for as
long as you see fit. You retain control over the data that
describes you.

Please read more of my thoughts on http://egosphere.blogspot.com
and help create a user centric system instead of the application
centric DataPortability. It has every concept exactly the wrong
way around.

I think it would be a powerful way to connect your past online web presence with your current web presence.

So much of Web 2.0 is focused on the _now_ and the _future_. But…

What if we could extend Web 2.0 into the past?

Thanks!