MySpace will launch its Data Availability later today (see here and here), beating Google and Facebook to the punch.

Unfortunately all three will be pretty much useless to us.

First, there are legal issues with sharing data, which I wrote about previously.

But that's not the biggest problem. None of these services will allow you to store anything beyond simple ids (no social graph, photos, etc). In MySpace's case, a developer can't even cache this data.

So every time we render a page, we'd be calling out to MySpace. The performance implications of doing this would relegate potential asewome data to a buried link, like "See my MySpace data". Vomit.

Let me know when we can sync. That's what data portability really is. I want to be able to upload a photo, add a friend, remove a friend, write a comment or change my first name, and have it appeaer across all my social networks. I want to see relationships. What team is most popular among MySpace users? Between MySpace and Facebook users, who is more accurate at picking scores and winners?

Sure, this may be a boon for sites that don't have any compelling user data of there own and get virtually no traffic, but those sites aren't relevant anyway.

Until we can sync data across social networks, all this "Data Portability" is just PR.

I've recently been tearing through various video tutorials that are out there including the ones produced by the fine folks over at railscasts.com.

A recent favorite that I've watched and implemented on Fan Profiles is the one about Site Wide Announcements. This is something that is pretty essential to any growing online community. Sooner or later you're going to want to message all your users about something, whether it be scheduled maintenance, new features, or other bits of info that may be relevant to the community as a whole.

One of the many cool projects that we've been working on is a killer new game available on Facebook. It's call Fight for the Top and it's probably the best Facebook sports app evar.

Today we launched the announcement system and have more than doubled the number of Fight for the Top users we had prior to today in a short few hours. We haven't done any promo for the app up to this point and it hasn't been available for very long but it was nice to see that the announcement system had an immediate effect on its user base.

I made a few tweaks to fit the code that Ryan covers in his screencast to make it work within Fan Profiles but for the most part kept it pretty much the same. Another great thing about these screencasts is that many others from the community offer up their input and/or improvements in the comments section. In this episode there was some good stuff added to railsforum.com and geoff.evason.name that is worth a look. In particular, the Geoff Evanson tips included using a cookie to track wheather a message has been hidden instead of a session which I found to be handy.

This post is partially a response to Steve Gillmor's article Facebook's Glass Jaw and partially a response to Cody's earlier post on the same subject. I firmly believe that Facebook should allow users to export their friends data elsewhere as well as many other pieces of PII. Of course the legal ramifications of such a decision would have to be investigated in depth, but in reality I own my friendships, I own my personal information, and if I want to share said data Facebook really shouldn't try to stop me.

And yes users and user information is core to Facebook's revenue stream, but friends, events, photos, etc. aren't. Facebook makes money - it does make some money - from targeted advertising based on, I'm assuming, usage patterns and Facebook-specific information, e.g., your networks, your groups, your activity. Now I'm not talking about exporting any of that. I'm not saying Facebook should share "Here's Dary. He's 24. He's a male. Oh and he likes movies and lives in Los Angeles so serve him ads for NetFlix and Fandango movie listings." Nor am I saying Facebook should create a Twitter-like API for friends' Facebook activity. I'm talking about Facebook distributing information that I have taken time to put in myself, information that is mine. I'm friends with Jorge Mir. What's the harm in letting Google and MySpace now that? If I can have my Jorge friendship show up elsewhere do I stop using Facebook altogether? Definitely not as I mostly use Facebook for viewing friends' activity, photos, and using applications, which leads me to my next point.

The privacy argument is, to put it bluntly, a joke. There is no difference between clicking a box that says "Share some of my information with other sites" and clicking the one that says "Know who I am and access my information" when adding an application on Facebook. This BBC article brought to light just how much personal information you get from a user adding your application. And as Facebook raises worries about Google or someone else sending PII to a completely random, potentially malicious, recipient all I have to say is, "That's exactly what you're doing!!!" There's no real oversight of Facebook applications. If a user adds it and chooses to share PII with it, then it's pretty much fair game to store as much user data as you want in a db somewhere (obviously against the TOS, but I'm pretty sure ne'er-do-wells couldn't care less). It clearly ain't that hard to collect massive amounts of PII using Facebook.

So why won't Facebook let me take my information elsewhere? Because it hurts the business? Not really. I'm sure most people would spend just as much time on Facebook, it'd just save them from having to find their friends all over again on a new site. Because of the privacy issue? Please. Checking a box to share some of my PII is no different than what they're doing right now with applications. As Facebook becomes more and more of a walled garden and the adoption of OpenId and Friend Connect becomes more widespread, I actually will consider leaving Facebook because I'll just get too frustrated re-entering the exact same information and re-finding friends over and over again.

In Conclusion,

Give 'em my data!

UPDATE: Further evidence of PII leaking from facebook: Facebook’s Friends Data Has Already Left the Barn

The blogs plunged from euphoric to despondent over the last 48 hours as MySpace, Facebook and Google all announced some sort of outside-the-wall sharing of their social graph data. See Here, Here and Here for a sample.

The tenor began to change as more information became available, hitting a low point with Facebook's blocking of Google's Friend Connect. See Here, Here and Here for a sample.

Is this news really surprising to people?

As a social networking fan and advocacy of openness, I say "that's garbage."

As an employee for a large company and an MBA student, I say "duh."

The first big issue with this initiative is Personal Identifiable Information. What PII data actually is varies, but is generally, first name, last name, email address, etc. Anything that could be used to identify the real "you".

PII is a really dicey issue in big companies, so much so that we have problems just transferring it from one server we control to another. Forget about trying to share it with, well, anyone.

Secondly, the incentives for the consumer is obvious, but what is the incentive for the business units?

OK, maybe Google is more willing to share their users info because this doesn't represent its core competency. Same with MySpace (owned by Fox). For these BUs, the publicity and potential attraction they get might be worth it (although, I still don't see it).

But what about Facebook? Facebook's sole business is its users and users' information. Why would it want to just give its business away to its competitors.

Sure, I'd love to have my Facebook friends in my Gmail address book and vice-versa, but I don't expect it to happen any time soon or ever.

And I get that.