Let's share

Another article in the AFR of 18/1/08 is titled 'Social sites must learn to share'. It's on page 79. It highlights the problems associated with transferring your content from one social networking site to another. For example, you might want to move from MySpace to Facebook or Twitter, or transfer your photos from Yahoo! Flickr to Google's Picasa, but the current lack of standards mean it's almost impossible to do so.
Companies that own these sites may be reluctant to allow this, but users are saying that they (the users) own their friendships, not the sites.
There's now an Australian-based working group, Dataportability.org, that's 'aimed at creating and promoting open standards for personal data across the internet'. One member of this group is quoted as predicting that the company that's the first to allow such data portability is in a powerful position as users would become committed to such as site, knowing that they can move in the future if they wish.