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.

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.