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I remember the early 90’s when email could never leave your ISP, SMS only worked inter carrier and number portability was just a dream. As time passed these technologies had to become portable to be successful – thankfully now social networks are starting to understand socialization of data applies to their business models too!

The most interesting thing is the MySpace is leading the pack with data portability.

MySpace is taking a much more interesting approach than Google, which controls data sent to third party sites via an iframe. MySpace is actually streaming data to these sites, which allows for true integration between the services, not just a bolted-on social tool.

Developers can access any publicly available profile data from a MySpace user and integrate it into their site. This includes a user’s name, picture, bio, social graph (list of friends), and other information. Users authorize the data transfer via a one-time secure OAuth login to MySpace from the third party service. The service is then allowed to access the data.

Since actual data is being streamed out of MySpace, they have a strict terms of use policy that forbids third party sites from storing or caching the data, other than the unique MySpace user id of the user. Each time a page is rendered the third party must re-request the data from MySpace via a set of APIs. That means any changes by the user to their MySpace profile data or friends list will be instantly applied across third parties who access the data.

Like Google and Facebook, users will be able to revoke access by any third party via a privacy control panel on their MySpace account

As Michael says, right now MySpace forbids the caching of data – but as with all technology that policy will change.

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