MySpace Data Availability Live Now
Posted by James | Filed under Data Portability, Privacy, Web
MySpace is set to roll out the first set of APIs for developers to implement Data Availability (an initiative in partnership with Yahoo, eBay, Photobucket and Twitter allowing users to share their profile data across sites). The company is expected to push documentation and specifications to their developer site soon.
Initially, users will be able to port their basic profile information, photos, and friend lists to supporting sites. It’s completely opt-in sharing, meaning that users will have to specify that they want third-party sites to have access to this data before it can be ported over. Specifically, MySpace says in a post announcing Data Availability:
You will find a new 3rd party site privacy dashboard located in the account settings of your MySpace profile. Just look under Linked Sites to view it. From here users can manage the relationship between their data and individual 3rd party sites. Any revocation of access to data from within MySpace takes place immediately at the external site as well. This ensures users won’t have their data floating around the internet without them being aware of it.
At the moment, this page is blank for me, since I’m yet to come across any implementations of Data Availability in the wild. Nonetheless, it appears MySpace has beat Facebook to a tangible implementation of data portability. If you’re a developer and plan to implement Data Availability on your site, give me a shout so I can check it out!
Tags: Data Availability, Data Portability, facebook, MySpace
Instant Messaging 2.0
Posted by James | Filed under Code, Future, Mobile, Privacy, Social, Web
There are some interesting things going on in the world of Instant Messaging these days. There is potentially going to be a shift from proprietary networks to ones built on an open standard called Jabber (aka XMPP, Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol). The technical details of Jabber which I’ll example below, make this a very big deal.
The biggest IM providers are MSN, AOL, Yahoo, and Google. For years, the first three operated proprietary, closed protocols. If you are logged in to AOL, you can’t talk to people logged in to MSN (there have been some efforts to link these networks; but in a such a way that the closed protocols are still used). You can’t reuse your contacts across accounts, just as MySpace contacts can’t be reused by Facebook (until DataPortability.org gets going maybe…).
Then Google entered the game. Instead of creating their own IM protocol, they implemented an existing well known IM protocol originally called Jabber, now called XMPP. XMPP had been around for a while and had been implemented most notably by several enterprise collaboration suite providers. But Google implementing it caused the big three to wake up and take notice.
Tags: instant messaging, jabber, open standard, protocols, xmpp
Digg Joins Data Portability Group
Posted by James | Filed under Code, Future, Geek, Privacy, Semantic, Web
Digg made a post to the company’s blog yesterday announcing their officially joining the DataPortability.org Working Group. Digg follows Facebook, Google, Microsoft and many other companies in getting on board to discuss protocols that will make it easier for users to move their data around the web, whilst still protecting their privacy.
The company posted more specifics about its embrace of data standards than almost any of the other participating companies has. "Digg already supports many of the open standards that let you use your data on sites other than Digg, including RSS, OPML, and hCard," wrote Digg’s Steve Williams. "We use RDF to embed the Creative Commons public domain dedication into each page. Just this week, we added MicroID, a Microformat that lets you prove to other services that you own your Digg user profile. We’ll be adding more open standards, such as OpenID, APML, OAuth, and XFN, in the coming months."
Tags: data, dataportability, digg, open standards, Privacy, standards
Welcome to Jimmahdigital.com, personal blog of James Simm, Wigan/Manchester-based .Net developer.
