After Social Graph FOO Camp — and a challenge for the Data Portability Group

This past weekend I attended a topic-specific FOO Camp called Social Graph FOO Camp (otherwise known as SGFOO) organized by Scott Kveton and David Recordon (or ray-chor-dohn according to Larry).

Scott’s write up is pretty complete, but I wanted to call out one specific outcome that I think is worth noting.

On Sunday, we had a significant discussion on data portability and about the activities, responsibilities and opportunities of and for the eponymous group which has recently generated much hype and buzz but little, (as far as I’ve see) clarity and/or cogent strategy for advancing its expansive charter:

The purpose of this project is to put all existing data portability technologies and initiatives in context and to promote viable reference implementations (blueprints) to the developer, vendor, and end-user communities.

The frustration over the minimal barrier to “becoming a member” of the group (you simply have to sign up for a mailing list) and the focus on large vendors without advancing an agenda with teeth and clearly defined metrics for success was palpable. But so was the desire to make some progress, and if not come to complete agreement, to at least identify concerns shared by the majority of us and perhaps develop a strategy to deflate the hype to date and get the group moving in a productive direction.

My suggestion was to emulate the work that Tara and I have been doing on the Open Media Web project, which developed out of our work with Songbird where we could sense that there was a real opportunity to explore, but didn’t yet have a clear picture of either the space as it was understood by lead users and experts nor of the outcomes that needed to be advocated. So rather than diving in and promoting technologies or tactics before we had identified the opportunities, challenges and boundaries of the problem domain, we decided to pursue an investigatory strategy, starting with a series of meetups, blog posts and interviews (vlogged on Viddler) that might help us flesh out the actors, ideas and conversations that were already ongoing in the space.

The result of my proposal is captured in this post by Chris Saad to the Data Portability mailing list. I think this is a positive step, and one that I hope will give Data Portability some direction and good work to do over the next several weeks and months. I’d like to go a step further and flesh out my thinking however, before this project gets underway.

1. These interviews should really be conducted assassin-style (as I like to say) where someone (probably Chris Saad) goes to each major vendor represented (and pimped) by the group (i.e. Google and Facebook, Plaxo, Microsoft, LinkedIn, Flickr, Six Apart, MyStrands, et al) and solicits written (or video) answers to the same five or six questions. Each of these interviews should subsequently be posted to the data portability blog over a series of months.
2. The goal of these ongoing interviews should be to discover primarily: 1) why these companies joined the group and what their goals are; 2) what they think of when they say “data portability” 3) what challenges are they facing when it comes to offering their vision of data portability at their company? 4) what are the greatest benefits of data portability? 5) what are they doing (if anything) to promote and advance data portability within their organization? 6) what technologies have they implemented (or plan to implement in the next six months) in support of data portability? From these answers, I think we can start to recognize trends in both the headspace of large social networking sites as well as begin to call out certain technologies that might be worth picking up and evangelizing, especially in the interest of interop between multiple parties’ sites.
3. As such, the advocacy of any particular technological solution by the data portability group today should be immediately abandoned until further research and exploration has occurred. While I was happy to see my favorite stable of technologies listed on the group’s homepage in the early days, I now realize that technology is not the hard part; it’s actually the politics, the policies, the usability and impact on and perception of the individual data owners that are really the first order priorities. Without beginning to address issues in those areas first, the technology conversation will never occur.
4. In terms of timing, I think that the data portability group has come along more or less at the right time, but that it’s actually walking into the problem ass-backwards. What we don’t need right now is a lot of hype and glorification of an abstruse notion of data portability. In fact, data portability by itself is currently meaningless and intangible; without good examples of how it can be applied to make things better for companies’ customers, there will never be an economic imperative to move in this direction (I should point out that data portability is interesting to me because increased customer choice is interesting to me, and thereby competition in the space is beneficial to the customers of such services). For a timely example of a positive case where data portability is making a difference, consider the ability to move your bookmarks from del.icio.us to Ma.gnolia in lieu of Microsoft’s looming acquisition bid of Yahoo!. Surely there are other equally beneficial applications of data portability, and building out these use cases in terms of end-user benefit is critical to continuing to make the case for data portability with credibility.

So anyway, I do believe that there is an opportunity here and Chris Saad is correct that getting a number of the prominent players in this arena to come to the table on this topic is a feat; however, simply bringing them together without engaging with the gnarly problems and policies that have kept data portability from becoming a reality could bring more confusion and angst than benefit. Deflating the hype and going back to humble beginnings and simple questions is, in my not-so-humble opinion, the appropriate and most effective way forward. Data portability is still not obvious for most people or most companies — heck the technologies that enable it are barely out of their 1.0 and 2.0 phases yet — and still this topic is one that captures people’s imaginations and lets them imagine countless “what if” scenarios that seem, somehow, just around the corner. Data portability is a critical topic, and with the advances in the state of the conversation we had over the weekend, I’m eager to see the members of the data portability group pick up the ball and keep moving it forward.

So, if this topic is something that interests you, I recommend you blog about it, talk about it, interpret it and really take some time to consider what data portability means to you, and why it matters (or doesn’t) to you. Me, Larry and Matt Biddulph of Dopplr rapped about this stuff some more on our Citizen Garden podcast today, so if you’re looking for more information, ideas or fodder, you might go ahead and give it a listen.

Author: Chris Messina

Inventor of the hashtag. #1 Product Hunter. Techmeme Ride Home podcaster. Ever-curious product designer and technologist. Previously: Google, Uber, Republic, YC W'18. View all posts by Chris Messina