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Put your MySpace profile in your other online spaces

by Stuart Corner
Friday, 09 May 2008
! In a move that appears to be aimed at making it the heart of the growing world of social networking, MySpace has made it possible for users to share their MySpace public profile data to websites of their choice automatically: initially Yahoo!, eBay, Photobucket, and Twitter. Related stories Linux speaks your instant messaging dialect James Bond Online: the strange tale of MI6, Facebook and eBay OZtion claims one-third of Australia's online auction market MySpace Music brings unlimited online listening EU warns online music stores: change or be changed Under MySpace's 'Data Availability' initiative instead of having to update information such as their default photo, favourite movies or music on each social networking site where they post such information user will be able to update it on MySpace have it updated on the other sites automatically. "The launch of Data Availability is an unprecedented move to further socialise the Web and empower users to control their online content and data," said Amit Kapur, COO of MySpace. "We are thrilled to begin this initiative with a world class suite of landmark partners and invite websites around the world to participate." Steve Pearman, SVP of product strategy at MySpace, has been reported saying that other partners would be able to join "in a few weeks," after agreeing to some basic terms and conditions aimed at preventing user data from being abused." MySpace will rollout a central location in its site that allows users to manage how their content and data is made available to third party sites they have chosen to participate. Shared content could include: publicly available basic profile information, MySpace photos, MySpaceTV videos, and friend networks. The MySpace Data Availability initiative uses OAUTH and Restful APIs as its core technology. MySpace says it is using open standards "in an effort to embrace the open source community and allow the implementation to be as non-proprietary as possible." It says this is only the first stage of a larger data portability initiative and that it has joined the Data Portability Project to demonstrate its "continued commitment to openness and open standards." The Data Portability Project's (ww.dataportability.org) aim is "to put existing technologies, techniques, policies and initiatives in context in order to facilitate translation, education, advocacy and ultimately implementation of data portability." It defines portability "as both physically moving data or simply porting the context in which the data is used." It is a community driven project: the 'about' page on its web site says: "Our about page is lacking at the moment. Given we are a community driven Project, would you care to add to it?" Please enable JavaScript in your browser to post your comment! Tags See All Tags Data portability Facebook MySpace Social networks Stuart Corner Twitter Yahoo! eBay Get stories like this delivered daily - FREE - subscribe now