As announced here and here MySpace now joined the DataPortability Project and announced their own initiative called „Data Availability“ which is about data sharing between their launch partners Yahoo, Ebay, Twitter and Photobucket. More partners might be added later. The technical details of Data Availability are not known yet but according to TechCrunch the project will launch in the next few weeks. I hope we will also see then how they actually do it. So far is known that the whole technology is build on top of MySpace’s RESTful API they released earlier.Regarding DataPortability this is great news as it means that we can work with a partner who implements one form of data portability already. Having more input from real life examples on what works and what does not will definitely be good for the Best Practices documents which in the end will define what „DP compliance“ means. So if in the end Data Availability will transform into Data Portability this would be great.
I also would be very interested in seeing how they do updating without having to poll all the time (in the open standards space usually XMPP is mentioned to push data to interested parties, so it will be interesting to see if they use that and how it performs as I also heard issues about this in the context of using it in Second Life).
Another thing to note is that they seem to be eager to be the first and make their own twist on Data Portability with their own term. This might sound silly but it’s one of those FIRSTisms you always see around new ideas and technologies (I remember Second Life and it’s stream of yet another company being FIRST quite well). For DataPortability it means that the idea is important enough to do something like this. It might be on it’s way to become an important business factor.
But most importantly: Welcome on board and I hope we will get many conversations going!
Update: Ben Metcalfe commented on it via Seesmic:
This answers some important questions like:
- In the end this will not be available to those launching partners only but to everybody
- The work will be done closely with the DataPortability Project.
So that’s definitely good news then!
(Video above by SmashCut Media)
Technorati-Tags: dataportability, myspace