How to do data portabilityMonday, May 26, 2008 by Dave Winer.
The best way to achieve data portability is to just do it. I know that sounds silly, or obvious, but there is so much pretending that there's more to it, that it has to be said. If you want to accomplish something by talking, call up a friend who works at Netflix or Yahoo and ask them if they'll let users move around their movie rating data. I've been asking about this for years. No one's email addresses are involved. All I want is the power to give Netflix permission to read an XML file on yahoo.com that contains my movie rating data (assuming Yahoo goes first). Anyone can see how much power this would give Yahoo. Why don't they do it? I honestly don't know. If I were them, I would. Another example -- if Twitter wanted to buy itself some time and growth, and give developers something exciting to do, they would store as much user profile data as they can off twitter.com servers and on Amazon. Simple XML formats, use some of their ability to raise investment capital (which they have proven) to grow the human network while they patch up or rewrite their system software. The more data they can move off their outage-prone systems, the more the network can grow around them, but not dependent on them. Amazon has proven they can keep their servers running. Leverage that.
Update: Brad Feld argues for APIs. A few months ago I would have agreed, but today I don't think an API is enough. As we've seen with Twitter, when the service goes down, there is no API and there is 100 percent lock-in. We need more. The most vital data must be stored off-site, so it doesn't go away when the service goes down. |
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