How Would Profile Portability Change The Web?
Last night I went to the DEMO event in Boston. It was great to see both familiar faces and people I’ve known only on twitter. While talking with people, my conversations inevitably ended up moving to the topic of data portability. It’s something that’s been on my mind a lot lately, and when something is on my mind, I tend to discuss it with anyone that will listen. Sorry about that, everyone I talk with.
Then today I saw this tweet from my esteemed co-blogger, Sarah Wurrey:
Why can’t friends lists be portable from site to site? I despise joining new sites bc i don’t have a f’n hour to look people up & add them.
As usual, she was able to explain in 140 characters what I’ve spent dozens of hours and countless blog posts to get across.
And, predictably, this got me thinking about data portability. In particular, I started thinking about profile portability and how that would work. Rather than give any answers (since I have none of those), here are some questions.
Imagine a world where your profile data lives in one place and can be accessed by any service you grant access. You fill out a profile in one place, then when you sign up for a new service, you simply point to your profile. With that said:
- Who hosts your profile data?
- What is the host’s motivation for storing your profile?
- If you have hundreds of accounts at different services, wouldn’t they slam your profile host?
- As a user, do you have to decide to give read/write access to services, or can they only read?
- If they can write, who decides which fields go in your profile? Let’s say a service needs a field that isn’t already in your profile. How can that work?
- Do you, the user, add fields to your profile? Or can the services do that?
- What happens if your profile host goes down? If twitter goes down, you just can’t use twitter, but if your profile host goes down, wouldn’t you be completely out of business?
- In this model, wouldn’t every service now be dependent on the profile host?
- Would services be able to send you emails? If you sign up, do they now automatically gain access to your email address? How would this work technically?
And the big question is this: since almost every internet business is based on the "you create a profile here and we own your data" model, how would they change if they now needed to employ the "your data is yours, we just play with it and do stuff" model?
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