Passport Control

Data Portability is the type of phrase that only the tech-heads of Silicon Valley get excited about.  In English, it simply means the ability to carry your personal data from place to place on the web, rather than creating similar profiles with many different organisations, websites and social networks.  Today's system is like having different passports for each country of the world that you visit.  Data Portability is the vision that wherever you go online, a single passport is enough to get you through customs and a room for the night.  Simple, right?  Yes, but like everything else happening on the modern web there is a gigantic power struggle going on beneath the surface.  To date, the approach of the mega social networks has been to try and keep users within their walls.  The main tactic they rely on for this is inertia.  Just like a bank, once you have spent so much time and effort finding a lender who does the basics, built a record with them, and designed your life around their products, it becomes a wrench to move elsewhere.  For social networks this inertia is largely driven by the power of the network effect.  And, to date, this dynamic has been enough to sort the men from the boys, leaving just a few social network operators standing including Facebook, Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and MySpace. However, all of the big players are aware of the scenario where inertia is not enough to keep their customers in place.  If your friends suddenly start deserting a social network for the next big thing, you may well throw inertia to the wind and join them.  It's the equivalent of a run on a bank.  So rather than just be the fashionable country that people may eventually tire of, the next fight is to decide who gets to issue the passports.  Last week, three social nets made announcements designed to give them passport control.  The initiatives were MySpace MySpace Data Availability, Facebook Connect and Google's Friend Connect.  All have different takes on the same issue.  (Notably, Google are trying to build around you, while the others want you to build around them).  But regardless of strategies, it's still a fight to become the official identity-manger of the web.  And it's that identity brokerage role that is the big prize for social networks, especially as they are still trying to find viable financial models.  Will it work?  Who knows.  Microsoft tried their own passport service a while back and it hasn't really taken off.  And many other such systems have been the victims of over-complexity, aka death-by-a-million-features. But the promise of being the guys who issue the online passports is too tempting.  Expect to hear a lot more about Data Portability.

Comments

[Rory]

James you have just simultaneously blogged on the same topic as Idris Mootee, so I will repost my comments to see what you think:

Social networking is the basis of society.

However, as an ancient art, real world networking is something which is incredibly refined and granular. It is a skill and a game which, in the most successful areas of society, has complex rules and tactics are often explicitly passed on from parents to their children.

It is a little more complex that "friend"/"not friend" but none of the existing social network have really begun to develop beyond this neanderthal level.

I think that the whole social networking thing is crying out for a P2P client based architecture where the end user has a greater control of their own data.

As social networking develops from a teenage chat rooms into a platform for more sophisticated networking, intelligent people are going to ask how much of this information they really want to be handing to Google, Microsoft or anyone else.

The option on any of the major networks of a free service v's pay for greater privacy (of your network data), and a more refined control platform with greater granularity, would attract a lot of people into paying.

[James Cherkoff]

Hi Rory, great analysis as ever. What you are referring to sounds like the latest Searls adventure - VRM. Very interesting area.