MySpace, Facebook, Google Integrate Data Portability

摘要

With more websites requiring personal data to work effectively, data portability is one way to give website owners access to social features that can draw in more traffic while letting users synchronize their profiles and friends lists across different sites. MySpace was the first to announce such an initiative, but Facebook and Google quickly followed suit. On May 8, MySpace announced its Data Availability project, which will use the site's previously internal RESTful API (which sends an HTTP GET or POST to call exposed methods on a network and receives an XML document in return) to make user data available to its partners, including basic profile information that's publicly available, MySpace photos, MySpaceTV videos, and friend networks. The project also uses the OAuth API (an open protocol that allows users to protect and grant access to personal data) for user authentication, meaning that users will be able to change or revoke third-party access to their information at any time. At the launch, only four companies have access to this data: Yahoo!, eBay, Twitter, and Photobucket. With Data Availability, these sites can synchronize friends lists or suggest that you add friends in one program who are on your friends list in another.