MySpace, Yahoo, eBay, Photobucket and Twitter get into data sharing; the future of online profiles?
MySpace has announced a partnership with Yahoo!, eBay, Photobucket, and Twitter to launch the MySpace ‘Data Availability’ initiative, which aims to ‘empower’ global MySpace users to share their public profile data with websites of their choice throughout the internet.
The system claims that this helps “open the doors to traditionally closed networks by putting users in the driver’s seat of their data and web identity.” It claims that this is the first time that a social website has enabled its community to dynamically share public profile information with other sites.
Unlike the Facebook system Beacon, which tells people’s online ‘friends’ what they are buying/doing online if users choose to leave it active, MySpace claims that this initiative puts the user in charge of their own data: “Users will have control over what information they share and who they share it with.”
The new scheme allows people to update their profile in one place and then share that information with the other websites in the partnership. The brand says this gives people the chance to
“manage how their content and data is made available to third party sites they have chosen to engage with.”
Inside this opt-in framework, they will be able to share:
(1) Publicly available basic profile information
(2) MySpace photos,
(3) MySpaceTV videos
(4) Friend networks.
So….what do you think of this new initiative? It’s certainly interesting. Do people want a way to use the same data across many websites? It’s a step towards making things easy for folks when they are using the internet.
But many people don’t wish to have the same information available to so many different websites and feel uncomfortable about this amount of information being shared between different corporations, even if they are in charge of managing it. Does this mean that personal data will be even more out of people’s own hands than ever before?
Any views? An attempt to make life easier for consumers or a way for corporates to gather ever more data on their users?
***UPDATE***
Facebook has joined the party with the launch of Facebook Connect, technology for members to connect their profile data and authentication credentials to external websites. It makes the company the latest social network to embrace data portability. It comes only a day after MySpace announced its data portability service.
Through Facebook Connect, members will be able to use their Facebook identities across the Web–profile photos, names, photos, friends, groups, events, and other information. Facebook profile content, for example, could appear on other social sites and so on.
Google has also announced Friend Connect, a data portability service or a sort of ’social network base’ taking some elements of services such as Ning.
Interesting times ahead!
May 9, 2008 at 12:19 pm
[...] unknown wrote an interesting post today on MySpace, Yahoo, eBay, Photobucket and Twitter get into data sharing; the future of online profiles?Here’s a quick excerpt MySpace has announced a partnership with Yahoo!, eBay, Photobucket, and Twitter to launch the MySpace ‘Data Availability’ initiative, which aims to ‘empower’ global MySpace users to share their public profile data with websites of their choice throughout the internet. The system claims that this helps “open the doors to traditionally closed networks by putting users in the driver’s seat of their data and web identity.” It claims that this is the first time that a social website has enabled it [...]
May 9, 2008 at 2:41 pm
[...] Brand Strategy Blog: MySpace, Yahoo, eBay, Photobucket and Twitter get into data sharing; the future… [...]