MySpace Lets Users Share Data Beyond Site’s Walls
San Francisco – In a surprise move that surfaced on Thursday, News Corp.-owned the world’s most popular social networking site MySpace announced that it is opening the gates of its popular online community by letting users automatically transfer profile information to other social-networking websites of their choice.
The project initiated by MySpace and Yahoo! have announced that public profiles, photos, videos and friend networks will now be portable from one site to another.
Under MySpace’s “Data Availability” project that is planned to kick off shortly would allow members to share their profile information with Yahoo, eBay, Photobucket and Twitter and that it is open to working with arch-rival Facebook.
“The walls around the garden are coming down,” said MySpace chief executive Chris DeWolfe.
“We, together with our data availability launch partners, are pioneering a novel way for the global community to integrate their social experiences Web-wide.”
“The launch of Data Availability is an unprecedented move to further socialize the Web and empower users to control their online content and data,” said Amit Kapur, COO of MySpace. “We are thrilled to begin this initiative with a world class suite of landmark partners and invite websites around the world to participate.”
Social-networking website enthusiasts are renowned for spending vast amounts of time and energy to customizing profile pages with pictures, videos, written musings, music, and links to blogs, websites and friends.
MySpace will be the “engine” for the data, allowing users to synchronize updates over as many websites as they wish or remove information whenever they desire.
“Rather than having to repeat such efforts at multiple websites to update information such as their default photo, favorite movies or music on each social networking site where they post such information, MySpace members will be able to select which personal details to transfer using mini-applications installed on partner websites and have it updated on the other sites automatically.”
According to reports, MySpace also stated that they will try to find ways for “mom and pop sites” to take part as well in the future.
DeWolfe described it as “a ground-breaking offering to empower the global MySpace community to share their public profile content and data to Web sites of choice throughout the Internet.”
At present Yahoo, eBay, Photobucket and Twitter have signed up but DeWolfe says he looks forward to other sites coming on board including “mom and pop” sites and their chief rival, Facebook.
“This venture is open to any site out there that wishes to work with us. We are happy to work with Facebook if they would like to join up with our effort.” The program is available to MySpace’s users worldwide, will be rolling out to a full version in the coming weeks.
“Historically, social destinations on the Internet have operated as independent, autonomous islands,” DeWolfe said. “Today, MySpace no longer operates as an autonomous island on the Internet…We are hoping to create a significantly more social experience across the Web.”
“In general, the companies taking part claim a total of 150 million members and extend to 85 per cent of the internet market in the United States.”
The MySpace Data Availability authentication will be done with the emerging standard oAuth and Restful APIs as its core technology. MySpace states that it is employing open standards “in an effort to embrace the open source community and allow the implementation to be as non-proprietary as possible.” It says this is only the first stage of a larger data portability initiative and that it has joined the Data Portability Project to demonstrate its “continued commitment to openness and open standards.”
The Data Portability Project’s (www.dataportability.org) is aimed at “putting existing technologies, techniques, policies and initiatives in context in order to facilitate translation, education, advocacy and ultimately implementation of data portability.” It defines portability “as both physically moving data and simply porting the context in which the data is used.”
MySpace emphasizes that members will have complete control over what data they share and who they share it with.
“Finding friends to follow is central to Twitter’s value as a real-time communication utility,” says co-founder Biz Stone. “This project enhances discovery and connectivity making Twitter more relevant and useful.”
The move out of the blue switches from the practice of “big guys” in social networking locking their users inside walls of proprietary technology, according to IDC analyst Karsten Weide.
“It is very bold and visionary because all of these open-access steps break with the past in many ways,” Weide said.
“We are truly entering a new stage in online media where things become a lot more open,” he added.
The approach may possibly pay off for MySpace, Yahoo and others by encouraging people to spend more time at all the websites instead of forcing them to decide whether to abandon one in favor of another.
“It makes life easier for consumers and encourages more usage,” Weide said. “The thinking is a rising tide will lift all boats.”
While information are thin right now, but ultimately it seems that end users will be capable of performing things like find friends from MySpace on Twitter, perhaps search for Twitter friends on Yahoo! Instant Messenger and perhaps port Flickr photos easily to eBay.