Data portability : demolishing the walls around your garden?

Reading my feeds this morning I came across two articles reporting that “the DataPortability Workgroup announced this morning that representatives from both Google and Facebook are joining its ranks.” The first article is from ReadWriteWeb.

Mashable goes on to say that

After months of competing platforms, privacy showdowns, arguments over who owns your social networking data, and something called “Scoblegate,” a huge announcement from the DataPortability Workgroup today: Google, Facebook, and Plaxo are in. What does this mean? From the announcement:

“… Users will be able to access their friends and media across all the applications, social networking sites and widgets that implement the design into their systems …”

 This is very encouraging news as it is a major gripe. I’ve already disabled my Facebook account once and emptied my profile.

Concerning Facebook, Stephanie wrote a very good article yesterday and extracted the essential.

Facebook has become a gigantic app-fest, and I regret it. Many newcomers around me see only that, and fail to understand where Facebook’s real value lies. Not in the Vampires, Superwalls, or Secret Crushes. But in the network of people you have there, and what you can do with them: plan events, share online doings, or discover more about them.

I would be happier if my profile was sufficiently granular to enable me to define clearly what segments were personal and what were professional. The notion of friends and followers departs from real world experience.

Now if the Data Portability do their work properly I can define what parts of my “profile” are for what segment of people across multiple social sites thus demolishing the walls around these “gardens”.