Search Engine Optimization News Blog

MySpace joined the data portability community today as well as announcing an affiliation with Yahoo, Ebay and Twitter. The goal of the new project, named Data Availability, is to encourage users to store all their information in one place so it can be shared from a central location across the partnered networks.

Data Availability’s mission is to create an environment where the users control their own data and who it can be shared with, instead of the individual entities keeping it locked up and forcing duplication across the web.

The hoped for outcome for MySpace in this experiment is that users will choose the social network as their ‘home’ for information. They can then share it easily between the partners, so that friends lists can be combined and expanded.

Twitter users can hook up with friends on MySpace and vice versa, while profiles, photos and video will be readily available from one network to another. This cuts down on the need to create and maintain separate profiles for each independent website.

MySpace is already part of a similar concept called OpenSocial which was launched by Google last fall to promote easy applications that would work on any partnering host. Yahoo is also a part of this network, but OpenSocial will not be connected to Data Availability at this time.

The real question is how active Microsoft and Facebook will be in this new endeavor; or if they will be players at all. Last January MSN joined the budding DataPortability group along with Facebook in a bid to become more user friendly, but the scale of MySpace’s move seems destined to overshadow Facebook for once…which is not an easy thing to do.

The combinations now overlap. Google, Yahoo, and MySpace formed an alliance through OpenSocial; Microsoft, Facebook and Plaxo joined DataPortability. Now MySpace, Yahoo, Twitter and Ebay are forming their own working version of the data portability concept, which currently excludes Google but theoretically puts them in the pool with MSN and Facebook as well. It will be interesting to see which companies manage to get along, and which refuse to play with others.

Some claim it is only a matter of time before Google asks to be included in the Data Availability group. Others wonder if this is finally the chance for Microsoft to get a piece of the action. Whichever way it goes, it is undeniable that the new data sharing methods could make life a whole lot easier for the average web user.