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.