This is a very tricky and fragile matter. Actually there are two matters here, first the standardization of web services - whether this be SOAP, REST or WS-*, this problem has been solved long time ago - and then there is creating a standard infrastructure of web services - this is what I'd like to rant on. Feeling confused? Well, don't, because this will be the next greatest thing after my grandmother's crunchy walnut baklava.
Here is the problem I see with the web services and Web 2.0 applications out there today:
- There are a lot of new websites that do pretty much the same things. RSS readers, social networks, heck even word processing sites (Google Docs rocks, I know, it's so cool!).
- I have my established (or maybe not so, who knows?) online presence and I'm using certain tools/applications to maintain it (Facebook, Twitter, Blogger, etc.)
- If I'm not happy with one service, it's almost impossible to move to a different one. This fact makes me locked in to one application either because I started using it the first, or because the majority of my friends circle is in it.
One of the major problems people have been arguing around is the question of who owns the data/pictures/videos people upload? If I put up a video on YouTube, does that video becomes YouTube's property? For the sake of simplicity, you can replace "media" with "profile", "data", etc.
The way I think of this issue is rather different than any other person's I've heard so far. I believe that you are the sole owner of your own media. Hence, you have a hard copy (offline) of the media at your person. The problem you're facing is, in order to share your media with your friends, you have to go through some third party social network. It also happens that this social network also makes tagging your friends on this media and commenting on the same media available to your and your friends' disposal. The key here is that the media is now in the 3rd party's control.
Are you with me so far? Here is what you've been trying to accomplish so far.
- You have some media you want to share with your friends.
- You upload this media where all or most of your friends can access.
- The place you uploaded allows you to link this media with your friends through tags or comments, etc.
Good. We can get back to what I believe in. My God says that even if I own the original media, the social network owns the plumbing that connects me to my friends. It's the social network's value-add to society. It may be your personal profile, your blog, your status updates. but it's the social network that provides you with the infrastructure to host this data.
It used to be that getting your data back from social networks was hard; not impossible, but hard. If you really wanted, you could use screen scraping. Nowadays, most sites give you public links that will take anybody outside the social network easily see the media or provide you with web service APIs that would allow you to look at your information from outside the social network's web site.
Twitter's API, for example, allows you to do pretty much everything you want to do on Twitter - including getting a list of your friends, followers, your and their statuses. When you think about the power Twitter gives in the user's hands, this is a great step towards enabling the user owning their own data.
Similarly, OPML - the XML document that describes "outlines" - lets you easily move your RSS subscriptions from one reader to another.
Don't even get me started on the power of Facebook and Ning APIs.
Now, imagine that you can move all your online presence over to wherever you want. In comes DataPortability.org. It's a project that started in November 2007 and has seen a lot of attention in the last couple of months. The idea behind the group is to merge the existing open standards, protocols, formats (such as OpenID, APML, and various APIs) with people's online presences (profiles, friends, media) in a way that the users have the control over their data. I'm very hopeful about the steps this group has been taking so far, and hopefully it's going to result in a new era in web applications.
Imagine tagging a picture on Facebook and viewing that same picture with same tags (and maybe more) on Flickr without doing anything... It's going to be slow but hopefully that's the direction I'd like to see social networks and web sites evolving into. Of course this might require different ways for you to host your data but what the hell, we're humans, we evolve!
