Note: This post isn’t strictly in-line with the proposed theme of the Web Appropriate blog, but we’re looking at an issue that affects all social networking services and potentially any apps/software/services which gather personal data (that’ll include the project being developed here at WebAppropriate)…..
Even though mobile SIM cards have always contained important data, the groups that appear in my Facebook newsfeed categorically prove that people have never, probably will never, put great importance on backing-up their SIM cards; just look at the group that popped-up whilst I was writing this post (no, I’m not making this up!);
But doesn’t the same go for every type of data? iTunes, essays, presentations, pitches, photos, USB sticks, DVDs; you name the data and the format, and there’s people out there who don’t back it up. I think there’s a simple reason for this; we all know that the time and effort required to backup data is far more tedious than simply moseying along, dealing with the ’small’ chance that we will suffer a catastrophic loss of all our data. Besides, the services, devices, and interfaces which allow us to CRUD this data generally keep us happy by doing exactly what they say on the tin.
Popular web services (like Facebook) are collecting and aggregating our personal data, including contact details (friends, family, and colleagues etc), and pulling it in to their lucrative, perspective-valuation-fueled, walled gardens. But, generally speaking, very little of this data being allowed to come back out again. However, there’s several initiatives that may change this to some degree, the leaders of whom are are fantastic Web industry contributors, have the right motives, and hope to create standards that will aid in free transportation of this data. The Data Portability group is making the latest waves in the blogosphere.
OpenID and Data Portability want you to be able to do whatever you want with your personal data, as long as it’s socially acceptable. That includes exporting it, which your average “Mark Zuckerberg production” doesn’t consider to be socially acceptable at this moment in time. We’re not just talking about contact email addresses (they are the trickiest part - someone gives you their email address, but does that mean you ‘own’ it and have the right export it to another service?); how about all the data that is produced during the process of defining your relationship with another person in a social Web app, i.e. ‘I went to school with this person’, ‘I hooked-up with this person’, ‘we dated’, etc. That kind of data unequivocally belongs to both people in the relationship, at least when publicly accepted by both people (as it often is in Facebook). The process of defining relationships is a phenomenon that makes the exporting process far more interesting.
OpenID and DataPortability are targeting the technical standardisations and specifications that will be need to be set in stone in order for you to be able to extract your data from a network. However, what no one has really touched on so far is that the interfaces (and the number of button clicks) are just as important as the standards. People need slick interfaces through which they can export and manipulate their data in a ‘mainstream-user-friendly’ manner. A user will only ever take their data out of a service, and import it into another, if it is easy to do so, and they’ve been aggravated enough, or teased enough, in to using another service.
Look at this mock-up screenshot I produced (click to enlarge);
People would, without a shadow of a doubt, export/backup their Facebook contacts if this screenshot was real. But if I was to show a mainstream web user the existing interfaces to OpenID, or if I asked them to explain why the Data Portability workgroup is so important, most would just look a little baffled.
However, If I was to show them my Facebook screenshot, I doubt they’d find it difficult to understand exactly what is being trumpeted by the open standards promoters. Very few people currently think about the implications of having their contacts stored in Facebook and not having the ability to export them. Why? Because Facebook just works. The question is, what kind of a social network CEO, whose user base is growing by hundreds of thousands of happy users every day, is going to give users a super-slick interface for exporting contacts, and even prompt them to do so?
Until the big players provide these kind of interfaces, and a few new big players arise, bringing with them a ‘need’ to export this kind of data (the tech folk niche and intrinsic early adopter habits don’t count for much in my opinion), these initiatives can’t fulfill everything their founders are hoping for (as much as I want them to!).
