Web’s Key Issue

Data portability and identity management issues are emerging as the key issues facing the Web today. They’ve already flared up in some hot-flash controversies, including Facebook’s Beacon project (blog post: Facebook: Ooops, Sorry About That Beacon Thing), which aimed to share user preferences and activities – including information about their e-commerce purchases – without a user’s explicit consent.

Over the holiday season, blogger Robert Scoble whipped up some controversy by testing beta software – from vendor Plaxo, by coincidence – designed in part to allow him to move his Facebook data away from the site. Over a few-day flare-up, Scoble’s Facebook account was suspended and then reinstated, the event seemingly becoming a landmark event in the evolution of data portability issues.

While social networks like Facebook, MySpace and others have gained a pioneer’s advantage in the user data game, Web giants like Google, Yahoo and Microsoft are not content to allow these upstarts to “own” or “control” customer data in ways that minimize their ability to turn Web eyeballs into dollars.

All three search leaders have stumbled in launching their own social networks. Their next move seems to be to leverage their large customer bases in areas like email, instant messaging and blogging tools to provide a new but powerful entry point into the Web’s social graph.

Google, for instance, is banking on its OpenSocial initiative to syndicate social capabilities and widget-style applications, moving the power away from Facebook’s network (blog post: Ten Questions for Google About OpenSocial).

Meanwhile, at the CES show in Las Vegas this week, Yahoo showed a demonstration of its next-generation user interface that puts email at the center of the user’s social experience, integrating messaging with a person’s extended social network, tagged content and other applications. Yahoo has also delivered a third-party development environment to integrate with other social networks and applications.

"Yahoo is uniquely positioned to make this all a reality - we have scale, a huge community of users, great applications and APIs and insightful data,” said Yahoo co-founder David Filo, at the show.