More Non-News re: Google and Facebook
January 9, 2008
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Yesterday, Read/Write broke the news that Google and Facebook had joined the DataPortability Workgroup, which got a bunch of Social Media folk all moist and whatnot. Read/Write called the news a “Bombshell,” Scoble took the opportunity to complain about getting kicked off of Facebook for using Plaxo’s email scraping tool, Umair Haque links the news to his Edge Principles, Dennis Howlett calls the DataPortability Workgroup “stillborn” (ouch), and so on and so on.
I’m all for giving users the ability to move their data anywhere they want — who wouldn’t be? Data portability is inevitable and is just the right thing to do…but is it really necessary for these two giants to join a group to make this happen? It seems like they can do a lot of the work now without waiting for a group decision. Sorry, having spent half of my life in Washington, DC, I have grown an aversion to committees and working groups — nothing ever gets done. It looks like good PR for all involved (Facebook, Plaxo, Google, and Scoble), but unnecessary to me. What do you think?
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2 Responses to “More Non-News re: Google and Facebook”
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I think the group formed to do the right thing because the big guys were doing nothing and actually many of their practices and features do the opposite (not naming names). So now, it’ll be interesting to see if their joining the group and coming to the table so to speak will have good effects or adverse ones. This could just be a media play in the end. I really hope not.
I think at least Facebook joined more as damage control than anything else. Why should we have these giants telling us “ok fine you can move your contacts between social networks” when to me its nearly the same as moving the contacts from Facebook to my cellphone?