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?
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