Last week Facebook announced the ability to export your profile “and keep a closer eye on the sites and apps that they have allowed to access the profile.”
Before this, developers could get into user profiles through Facebook Connect. The Facebook and Twitter APIs are relatively open. But this is the first time users have easily been given a way to get a handle on their specific profile. Facebook’s Director of Engineering, Aditya Agarwal, shared with me on a phone interview that the potential for the use of Facebook data is much higher. Content can be personalized to give people a better experience.
A team of researchers at the National University of Ireland in Galway argue for something even more open. In their paper Social Network and Data Portability using Semantic Web Technologies the outlines a vocabulary to structure user generated content in a machine-readable way. This allows the social data to easily be used across services and applications.
I can relate to the problem this group is trying to solve with an example:
I have friends using Gowalla. I have friends using FourSquare. I have friends using Latitude and I have friends now using SCVNGR. I have a circle of friends on Facebook, on Twitter, on Email, on LinkedIn on Flickr and so on. But each of these services require me to reconnect with all the people I’m friends with. So, I use Facbeook Places. Why? Not because it’s more fun, or because the interface is better, but because that’s where my friends already are.
But if I could have all of my friends, everywhere, would there be more competition and therefor better quality of product across services?
What if Match.com could pull up everyone’s Facebook profiles to get an arguably more authentic profile of who you are. For better or for worse, I suppose.
I don’t think it’s likely that we’ll see a mega network any time soon where people share all of their content to one service then feed all of it back out. That was the problem with Buzz. It basically became a Twitter Feed with a Like button and the occasional original post.
What I like about this Irish team’s proposal is the human side of problem solving. Their solution gives users more control, more flexibility and potentially more scalability to connect and share easier with their friends. It also has the power to increase and personalize the quality of our experience online as a whole.