09 Jan More Non-News re: Google and Facebook
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?
