Semantic Web Company

Just found on BBC News: “MySpace members will soon be able to use their login details to get access to some other websites.” Regrettably, they draw a distinction between “providers” and “relying parties” – a “provider” is a website who, like MySpace, will allow users to user their login details on other sites as well:

However, MySpace is not letting its members use their login profiles and details on any site. It has set restrictions on where the login details can be used based on whether those sites create or accept OpenID profiles.

It will only allow MySpace details to be used to get access to what are known as “relying parties” – organisations that accept rather than create the portable identities. Sites such as Plaxo are relying parties.

Initially, OpenID profiles created from a MySpace account will be blocked from being used on sites regarded as “providers”. In the OpenID scheme sites that let create OpenID profiles for use elsewhere are “providers”.

Similarly, MySpace will not allow people who get an OpenID from a provider, such as Yahoo, to use that to login to the social network site.

It said in the future its policy would change to let members get the most out of OpenID.

Why this restricted use policy? It seems as if, like before when MySpace signed up to data availability, they are first and foremost interested in “trying to become a large centralized profile repository on the internet” (David Recordon).

Just a quick round-up and update to yesterday’s post about the data hippie bandwagon: TechCrunch wrote a piece in which “data portability” is referred to as “The New Walled Garden” (strictly speaking, I guess the title should have read “data availability is the new walled garden”):

Internet giants know that the days of getting you to spend all of your time inside their walled gardens are over. So the next best thing is to at least maintain as much data about the user as possible, and make sure they identify with your brand while they are out there not being on your site. [...]
I think Facebook’s intentions aren’t to let users get data out of the network until Facebook is absolutely forced to do so, and then only on Facebook’s terms (see Facebook Connect). The fact is, this isn’t Facebook’s data. It’s my data. And if I give Google permission to do stuff with it, I’m damned well within my rights to do so. By blocking Google, Facebook has blocked ME. And that, frankly, kind of frustrates me. Let me put this another way. How dare Facebook tell ME that I cannot give Google access to this data!

David Recordon from O’Reilly also comes to the conclusion that “MySpace’s Data Availability is not Data Portability.”

At the end of the day it seems that MySpace is trying to become a large centralized profile repository on the internet. One where information might be available but certainly not allowed to be actually moved outside the network’s walls. A good try, but just as no one would like Microsoft own identity for the entire web with Passport I fail to see how others will let MySpace own all of the profiles.

How long until a social networking site comes up with TRULY user-maintained and user-owned, FOAF-based identity management tools, harnessing similar methods such as Henry Story’s BEATNIK semantic address book project?

Data Availability or Data Portability – who do you trust? MySpace’s recent announcement to adopt a number of ‘data availability standards’, together with Facebook’s Connect and Google’s Friend Connect announcements have caused quite a buzz on the blogosphere: TechCrunch wrote about it (and presented a screenshot of what MySpace data on Twitter could look like), ReadWriteWeb wrote about it (kindly “hyphenating” the word “availability”), Webuser wrote that MySpace already ‘joined the Semantic Web’, everyone else and their dog wrote about it. So here I am, writing about it, too, and asking: Have we finally reached the age of free data love where personal data giants such s MySpace happily share their trips with everyone else?

Hmm. I have got the slight feeling that some PR department was trying to give off the impression that Data Availability and Data Portability are actually the same thing, and that a number of the skim-readers on the web (and aren’t we all skim-readers, most of the time?) all too easily fell for it.

Well, the terms sort of refer to the same, but not quite. On the one hand, there’s the DataPortability workgroup who defines data portability as “the option to use your personal data between trusted applications and vendors” [DP] and who seek to promote the use of a range of “open standards, microformats, and protocols that currently enable various aspects of data portability. These include APML, FOAF, hCard, OAuth, OpenID, OPML, RDF, RSS, SIOC, the XHTML Friends Network (XFN), XRI, and XDI” [Wikipedia].

And then there’s MySpace’s “Data Availability Project…” hey, let’s not forget that there’s NewsCorp behind MySpace, and do I really believe that open standards are on Rupert Murdoch’s agenda?
(more…)