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
Reddit Goes Open Source
Posted by James | Filed under Social, Web
Reddit has decided to open source their entire code base, allowing developers to see exactly how the social news site works. With the move, Reddit is encouraging developers to submit their own code and extensions for improving the site. Of course, they are also potentially opening up the site to serious gaming, since developers will be able to dissect precisely how Reddit’s algorithms determine what is popular and makes it to the homepage.
Steve Huffman, co-founder of Reddit, thinks this transparency is something users deserve, and is a strong competitive move against leading social news site Digg. “Digg has struggled to stay transparent with their users,” he said. “Social news in general has hid behind algorithms, which has caused some consternation amongst users. Users don’t get why things aren’t showing up on the front page.” Of course, he is referring to the fact that Digg’s algorithms are completely secretive, often creating frustration amongst users when stories with a lot of Diggs and comments are left off the homepage, but seemingly less important stories find their way to the front.
Much like Facebook’s fbOpen, the idea of going open source isn’t so much as to encourage developers to build their own Reddit clones. In fact, Reddit is using the same licensing structure as Facebook – CPAL (Common Public Attribution License) – which stipulates that anyone who uses the Reddit code needs to make their changes available to everyone, as well as acknowledge they are using it.
Reddit’s new site for developers – http://code.reddit.com – is now available. At this point, the race is on to see who can figure out the algorithm first, and it’ll be interesting to watch and see how heavily people try to game the site once it becomes public knowledge. It should be noted that when the company launched its new re-design a couple of weeks ago, within minutes the most popular story on the site was one about how badly it sucked, encouraging Reddit to bring back the old version!
Tags: algorithms, Common Public Attribution License, CPAL, digg, facebook, Facebook Open Platform, Open Source, reddit, social news
Basics of Data Portability Explained
Posted by James | Filed under Future, Geek, Web
I’ve been reading a lot recently about data portability, and specifically the DataPortability.org Working Group. High level members of Google and Facebook staff joined the group about a week ago, key people from LinkedIn, SixApart, Flickr and Twitter joined a couple of days later, and Mozilla’s CEO said that his organisation is looking closely and will likely join the group.
That’s all well and good but does anyone actually know what we are waiting for?
Though it’s only been a week since Google and Facebook staff joined the organization, there’s been some key progress made this morning in explaining the aims of the movement. Whereas parts of Data Portability (like OpenID) have been plagued with foggy evangelistic efforts for years, check out the following video explaining the concepts. This strikingly well-produced work was made independently by screencaster Michael Pick of Smashcut Media.
DataPortability - Connect, Control, Share, Remix from Smashcut Media on Vimeo.
I’m really impressed. The past week may have been more talk and hype than anything else - but talk plays an important roll in building pressure for change. Major vendors have come to the table, now advocates of change everywhere have one more useful tool in this video to make sure that the public doesn’t forget about the conversation that’s begun.
Though it appears that Data Portability has a long road ahead of it and that major vendors are unlikely to open up access to their users’ data, in fact openness has some important competitive advantages. The open and integrated vendor has far greater network effect and scale of access to data for their own purposes than the data hording vendor. The biggest challenge may be building a new social contract to protect customer privacy and control in this exciting new era of portability and personalization. You can join that conversation at DataPortability.org and elsewhere.
Michael Pick has chosen the easy-on-the eyes player from Vimeo to embed his video, the code to repost the video elsewhere is available with just a click or two from inside the player here.
Tags: dataportability, facebook, google, linkedin, mozilla, openid, portability, sixapart, twitter, video
Welcome to Jimmahdigital.com, personal blog of James Simm, Wigan/Manchester-based .Net developer.
