Data Portability is Boring

This guest post was contributed by well-known web skeptic Drama 2.0.

Data portability is a hot topic in the Web 2.0 community. I’ve previously weighed in with my opinion: data portability is not a universal right and the value a company may receive from offering it varies from company to company. Some companies have a valid business rationale for offering it while others don’t.

In an interview in early February, Tim Berners-Lee, “the father of the web,” essentially stated that Internet services which aren’t offering data portability are “boring.” He explains:

Now if you look at the social networking sites which, if you like, are traditional Web 2.0 social networking sites, they hoard this data. The business model appears to be, “We get the users to give us data and we reuse it to our benefit. We get the extra value.” When one person has typed in who it is that’s in a photo, then we can benefit. We give the other person extra benefit by being able to give them a list of photos that they are in. That’s tremendously beneficial.

That’s the power of the Semantic Web. And I think, the social networking sites, some of the ones that have become very popular have done it because captured the semantics. They haven’t just allowed you to tag something with somebody’s name, they’ve allowed you to capture the difference between somebody who took the photo and somebody who’s in the photo, so that the power of the reuse of the data has been much greater.

So, first of all, are they going to let people use the data? I think, the push now, as we’ve seen during the last year, has been unbearable pressure from users to say, “Look, I have told you who my friends are. You are the third site I’ve told who my friends are. Now, I’m going to a travel site and now I’m going to a photo site and now I’m going to a t-shirt site. Hello? You guys should all know who my friends are.” Or, “You should all know who my colleagues are. I shouldn’t have to tell you again.”

So, the users are saying, “Give me my data back. That’s my data.” That was one of the cries originally behind XML, it was a desktop application. Don’t store it in a format which I can’t reuse. So, now it’s, “Give it to me using the idea of standards. If you do that, then I can do things with it.”

I find Tim’s comments amusing. While I don’t necessarily disagree with his vision, the number of mainstream Internet users I know who are getting their panties in a knot over data portability is about the same number of mainstream Internet users I know who could actually tell me what “FOAF” is - close to zero.

From what I’ve seen, it’s really only a small but vocal portion of the Internet population comprised primarily of technologists and Web 2.0 kool aid sippers who are beating the drum for data portability.

The truth is that the average mainstream Internet user doesn’t look at Facebook as a warehouse for data; Facebook is merely a place to socialize with friends and poke hot coeds. I’m sure users wouldn’t complain if there was an easy way to take certain data from one service to another, but by in large, I think the technologists pushing for data portability are trying to supply something that there isn’t a whole lot of demand for.

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