Chris Saad was recently interviewed at The 2008 Next Web Conference in Amsterdam. I took some notes about what he said so I could compare this to what’s current posted at the Data Portability website. You can watch the interview here.
What is Data Portability?
DP addresses the need to move data between services within your control and ownership.
Example:
Log into Facebook
- FB becomes aware of other vendor services you are associated with
- FB asks your permission to access and share with other vendors
- The other vendor services request your permission to share
Benefits to Businesses / Vendors
- Have limited information about users when they sign up
- With user permission, vendor gains access to broad range of information
- Vendors can provide a more personally relevent experience to users
Benefits to Users
- You can control data the vendors collect about you
- Prune, migrate, move, share and remove data from vendors
Problems implementing DP
Primarily DP has a political problem convincing vendors to adopt DP.
- Getting vendors and developers together so they:
- Understand how the standards come together, and
- How they can profit by following them
- Trusted by community, interoperable across vendors and useful to users without scaring them
Q & A
What is DP doing?
DP will design best practices in collaboration with open standards groups, advocating them, promoting their usefulness through a DP brand.
Are large companies sincere about DP?
- Some companies joined DP for PR
- If a lareg vendor breaks ranks to adopt DP, DP feels there will be a Facebook effect
- Small vendors have opportunity to move first and gain strategic advantage
- DP will rely on bloggers and community to pressure vendors to support DP
What are some strategic business advantages of using DP?
For Startups:
- They get lots of information about new users
(from other vendor sites supporting DP) - Reduces barrier to entry for users to come in and use new services
For established Vendors:
- Gain broader picture of their user
- Amazon gets your Google Searches, Facebook social graph
- Facebook gets photos from Flickr
But vendor profits are tied to the information that they only have about
their users (buying habits, search, clicks, etc)
- Vendors will loose in the long run as new companies take advantage of DP
- Web 3.0 is about personal user experience driven by data and personal control of data
How will companies compete if data is freely flowing it is no longer a competative advantage for companies
- Vendors compete around user value, applications, services rather than trying to lock in users
- Vendors don’t own users, users own vendors
