One Step Closer to Open Social Networks?: Google and Facebook Join the DataPortability Workgroup

After the recent scuffles between tech blogger Robert Scoble and Facebook over data portability and privacy, comes the announcement that Facebook - along with Google - has now joined the DataPortability Workgroup - (announced yesterday by Ben Metcalfe, the DataPortability founder, on his blog).

The optimistic vision for open social networks, where users will be able to share content freely across social networking sites, seems to be getting closer. Google and Facebook are, obviously, two of the biggest holders of social and personal information on the internet - on the one hand, they have enormous user populations clamouring for this facility, on the other, they presumably have a whole bunch of powerful advertisers and companies dying to "work with" all those rich user profiles.

Facebook (like Google) had already invested a lot in the concept of an open API, so why has it taken them so long to join the party? Donna Bogatin, quoting Eran Hammer-Lahav of ReadWrite Web, offers a dissenting voice to the hype around this new collaboration.

Kingsley Idehen has an interesting take on this, too. Like Mark Evans and others he is interested in using URIs and RDF to address the problems of data export from a different angle. As a semantic web kind of guy, Kingsley is very much an advocate of the concept of the web as a richly "Linked Data mesh". He points out that Facebook's "underlying data model is relational", and argues that Web Services APIs have to be seen "as part of a processing pipeline". This is his approach:

"I am able to make my Facebook Data portable without violating Facebook rules (no data caching outside Facebook realm) by doing the following:

1. Use an RDFizer for Facebook to convert XML response data from Facebook Web Services into RDF "on the fly" Ensure that my RDF is comprised of Object Identifiers that are HTTP based and thereby dereferencable (i.e. I can use SPARQL to unravel the Linked Data Graph in my Facebook data space)
2. The act of data dereferencing enables me to expose my Facebook Data as Linked Data associated with my Personal URI
3. This interaction only occurs via my data space and in all cases the interactions with data work via my RDFizer middleware (e.g the Virtuoso Sponger) that talks directly to Facebook Web Services.

In a nutshell, my Linked Data Space enables you to reference data in my data space via Object Identifiers (URIs), and some cases the Object IDs and Graphs are constructed on the fly via RDFization middleware."