The more involved we become with online interactions, whether online commerce, social networking, simply storing things, and (of course) work, the more we need to develop a sophisticated understanding of what this really means. You may think that the pictures you uploaded to Facebook are yours, but the effort involved in moving than can be far more complex than you might believe (as an example).
The following link and quotes provide some tools to help you control ‘your stuff’.
Creating a Portable Web: When your data is truly yours.
http://thenextweb.com/dd/2011/07/16/creating-a-portable-web-when-your-data-is-truly-yours
How do you create content on the web? Perhaps you upload a photo album to Facebook or write a blog post on Blogspot. That content is your data, right? Kind of… The problem is the content and accounts you create on the Web today are locked in a structure that’s been put in place by companies such as Facebook, Yahoo, and Google. They have your data in a silo. It is still “your data” but much like rosebush in a walled garden, it can be very difficult to pull your data out with its roots, function, and form intact.
For example, Facebook has its paws on your entire social graph- your photos, videos, and communications between friends, family, and acquaintances. As a company, Facebook has a great understanding of the social aspect of your life, at least online. While it has an API, Facebook is still the only company that can use that data to create compelling services on top of its platform. It opens up its social graph just enough to keep developers happy but to remain in control.
Right now, Google+ is forcing you to re-create your social graph. It’s asking you all of the same information that’s on Facebook but for its own silo. Companies are competitive in this way. They don’t like to communicate. It’s why you can’t message someone on Facebook from Google+.
The web is slowly maturing to become more portable, and a handful of companies are in the early stages of a new movement to create a more open web in which the user will have ownership of the content they create.
“I believe that whatever you create on the Internet should ideally belong to you and you should be able to take that data wherever you go. If you create a social graph on Facebook, you should be able to leverage that social graph elsewhere. Google should be able to tie into any content I create on Facebook as a first class citizen. That’s how we’ll have a truly competitive landscape for these social services. Inevitably another service always comes along geared towards what you like or maybe it’s a better service over all. The bottom line is you should be able to take your data with you because your data belongs to you.”
-Jaisen Mathai, founder of Open Photo
Singly: The Locker project.
Singly‘s Locker Project is an open source effort by developers to make it easy for a person to access the information they have contributed to the various services and websites they use, get a copy of it, and store that data wherever they feel is most secure and safe. This could range from their social data to financial data, browsing history, health devices and more.
“There’s a meaningful amount of information we leave about ourselves across the web and we believe strongly in the idea that putting that information back in a person’s hands can enable them to do things that just aren’t possible today,” says Jason Cavnar, co-founder of singly.
Telehash is the name of the protocol that Miller and other engineers have been working on that allows people to share their information in a peer-to-peer fashion, making the flow of personal information, as well as where it resides, far more secure. When asked about the future of The Locker Project and Telehash, Cavnar says, “If things go well, they will fade into the background. It will feel a lot like Jabber does today. Over 1 billion people use it to connect to each other – whether through IM, message boards, notifications, etc. That’s about half of the Internet that benefits in a big way from it and yet very few people know much about it. We hope to see a day soon where people know what their data locker is, and how it enables them. There will be a built-in assumption that a copy of everything we generate that is personal in nature, or consume in any digital fashion will end up a part of our individual locker–in a safe, secure environment, and from which you can share that information directly.”
There shouldn’t be an additional charge to export your data and it shouldn’t take hours to get your data out. DLF’s first product Google Takeout lets you take your data out of multiple Google products including Buzz, Contacts and Circles, Picasa Web Albums, Profile and Stream, in one fell swoop in portable and open formats‚ so it’s easy to import to other services quickly.
