MySpace Data Portability Will Change Social Networking

One of the most annoying things about maintaining a social network profile is having to manually repost updates from that profile to other services you use. Most of these social networks just don’t want to share, doing everything they can to lock their users into their little information silos.

Just as I was tediously retyping a party invitation from Facebook to Google Calendar for the nth time, a ray of hope appeared. MySpace announces their first steps towards data portability. They’ll start by letting users optionally pipe their MySpace data to Yahoo, Twitter, eBay, and Photobucket. They’ll be using open standards to do it, too — no Facebook-style proprietary crap.

The world’s biggest social network has found its lead under threat of late, so they’re finding another way to stay on top in a world where people increasingly mix and match services: play nice with those services. They’re partnering with just four sites right now, but it’s a good start.

MySpace is such a giant in this space that competitors will have no choice but to follow suit. People like Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg may think customers are too stupid to care about something as “geeky” as data portability, but more and more people using more and more services will easily see the advantages of not having to repost their crap over and over and over again. I look forward to the day when any online service I authorize can use open APIs to pull my data from any social network.

Until then, I’m sprucing up my long-neglected MySpace profile. I’d rather put my content and my social graph where I can use it anywhere I choose. So should you.