Ryan C Briggs

One of the main reasons that I started this blog was to have an “online home.” What frustrated me was that so many sites wanted to hold on to your data. Now, I understand why they do this, mining that data is their business model, but anyone who has entered the same stupid profile information more than once knows that the system is broken.

The dataportability project is trying to help websites share this data in ways that protect the privacy of users’ information, as is Google’s open social. Today, Myspace publicized a data sharing agreement between itself, Twitter, Yahoo!, Ebay, and Photobucket. This means, for instance, that users could use images from myspace on twitter, or use profile information from myspace on other services.

These walls need to come down and this is a really good start. The biggest culprit that I see right now is Facebook. Techcrunch has a good post which outlines the problems that exist in the online landscape and what possible solutions are.

/end nerd rant.