MySpace, YourSpace

MySpace has unveiled a new plan to turn the site into a central storage hub for users' personal data and profile information by allowing them to access and use that information when they visit other websites.

The idea is to make a good portion of MySpace data available to people when they're out exploring the larger Web. While not all MySpace data will be available, four popular aspects of each MySpace data will be potentially available to outside sites: profile information, photos, videos, and friend networks.

The new tools will be opt-in, so if people never want to share any of their MySpace info outside of MySpace, there's nothing to worry about.

If users were to login to Twitter via their MySpace credentials, for example, Twitter could then scan their MySpace friend networks and find those same people on Twitter. People wouldn't need to worry about knowing their Twitter username since the connection would already be established through MySpace.

Another interesting part of MySpace's plan is that the third-party sites using the new tools are not allowed to store any of your data.

On one hand the no storage policy gives users more control over where their data ends up. It ensures that if they share their MySpace data with another site, but the change their mind and decide to stop sharing it, that data will instantly disappear from the outside site.

The problem is, it also means that their data is ultimately still stuck on MySpace.

While MySpace's new features cover about half of the goals outlined by the Data Portability Workgroup (which MySpace joined yesterday as part of the announcement), it doesn't offer true portability.

One the bright side MySpace seems aware of the difference. The company is even using the term Data Availability rather than Data Portability.

What's the difference? Well, think of personal data as life savings. MySpace's new tools are an ATM card. Sites using the new tools are like ATM machines and users can have access to their cash from just about anywhere and enjoy using it all over the Web.

They just can't withdraw all their money and put it in another bank.

True data portability would mean having an ATM card that works everywhere, and allows users to move their money to another bank account without having to get a new ATM card.

In other words, where the actual data resides should be irrelevant, but it's not. Yet.

For instance, a broader vision of data portability would mean people could use MySpace as a host for their personal data and then one day decide they want to hand that duty over to Facebook. In such an ideal world, all they would need to do is login to Facebook, sync their MySpace data over, and then disallow MySpace any future access to that data.

For now that remains a difficult and ephemeral goal.

There are two basic problems with the data portability scenario.

First, no site — MySpace, Facebook or anyone else — wants users to be able to turn their backs on it that easily, so there's very little incentive for them to embrace a plan like that.

Second, how do users get rid of the data on the original host when you move to another host? In other words, when someone switch from MySpace to Facebook, how does he or she get rid of the information on MySpace's servers?

Data Portability is very tough thing to sort out and there isn't going to be a complete workable solution for some time.

That said, MySpace's announcement is huge and, while MySpace might not be the choice of the online hipster crowd, it has a massive mainstream user base. By opting for the pragmatic solution — make data available to outside sites — MySpace is effectively exposing some of the benefits of data portability to a much wider audience. Whether or not that audience gets excited about the new features remains to be seen.

For the launch, MySpace has partnered with Yahoo, eBay, Twitter and its own Photobucket service. As far as I can tell, though, the plan is to eventually make the API available to everyone.

The press release isn't clear on when the actual APIs will be publicly available, though Ben Metcalfe, co-founder of Data Portability, says the tools will be open to everyone.

Some other key parts of MySpace's plan remain unclear. For example: What sort of data formats and APIs will be used? Authentication will be handled through oAuth, an open standard for logging into websites, but the APIs and other tools are thus far a mystery.

In the end the real winner in today's announcement may well be Twitter. Although none of the partners have any tools developed at the moment, if Twitter implements something like the mockup at the top of this post (which comes from TechCrunch) the service is poised to jump from a toy of the tech-savvy elite to a mainstream audience (hopefully Twitter's servers are up to the challenge).

While it may not be the end-all data portability solution that some have been hoping for, turning MySpace into an ATM card for personal data is certainly a huge step in the right direction.

by Scott Gilbertson for Wired.com