Data Portability: Why Book Publishers Should Care
The flurry of news before Christmas regarding data portability, Facebook, Google, et al might be old hat to you but for the rest of us the announcements, alliances, and initiatives in this area are clear as mud. What follows is an attempt to distill what is going on in this space to a few key essentials. Hopefully it will spur further conversation and action (see end) amongst stakeholders in the book publishing industry.
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What Just Happened?
On December 4, 2008, the day after Black Wednesday, Facebook launched Facebook Connect — a new service that promises to be the single sign-on for the internet. Facebook’s partners allow users to authenticate for 3rd party sites and services using a Facebook ID/password. For 130 million Facebook users the web has become simpler to use. Their ID — peoples’ real identity (made up names aren’t allowed) — is now the pervasive keystone for data-exchange on the web. Hooray!
Not so fast.
Google is also keen to have the ID/password/profile associated with their services (gmail, blogger, youtube, picasa, etc.) be the defacto login for the rest of the web. And not to be out done, MySpace is in the game too. They have allied with Yahoo, eBay, Photobucket and other services to give their login primacy. Nicely, just to make things easy to differentiate for the average person, the names of these separate proprietary initiatives are almost exactly the same — Facebook Connect, Google Friend Connect, and MySpace’s Data Availability.
So if you are a book publisher why should you care? Well the easiest answer is that your readers do — or they will. The web is about to become one big social network and if you are developing any reader-centric initiatives with a login regimen (a reader community perhaps) then you had better pay attention.
Now it is sad to admit that in 2009, some publishers still see ‘readers’ as an abstraction. If that is you, if your customer is simply the bookseller you send your invoice to, then you can put your head back in the sand and stop reading here. For the rest of us, there are some other dimensions to consider:
User Identification and Single Sign-On Is Just the Beginning
Make no mistake, this isn’t just about the true identity of ‘leocat77′. Nor is it simply a land grab for demographic and psychographic data. This is about content ownership. This is about the connections between data (aka the semantic web) and the connections between users (aka the social graph). Facebook, Google, MySpace, Plaxo, Linkedin all want to know who is in your address book. They want to know whose pages you frequent. They want to know who knows who…and how.
From a user’s perspective, balancing these varied interests gets complicated when you give someone, who is say a Plaxo user, your business card. The user enters your information into their address book and instantly you are part of the social graph owned by Plaxo — whether you like it or not. A similar situation exists with comments on a blog. When you leave a comment, on say a Blogger blog, your data becomes part of the larger dataset controlled by Google. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing; it is just a new country of issues waiting to be discovered.
From a publishers’ perspective, there are slightly different things to consider:
- As an aggregator of readers’ data — be that book reviews, order history, or friend connections — publishers (and retailers for that matter) need to have a discussion about content ownership. Are you willing to give users control of their own information? Legally it might be easier to have users waive ownership rights in the TOS but increasingly users aren’t tolerating sites that make information/ID management difficult. To make users happy you may want to consider putting their interests first. For starters you could allow users to delete their accounts and export their data for use at a new service. If you want to be really progressive (sarcasm) you could allow users to pipe data via RSS from your platform to another and vice-versa. If you have had this conversation already and are planning on implementing an API, then collect $200 when you pass GO.
- As part of the larger web ecosystem, book publishers need to also have a discussion about who should meta-aggregate their user IDs. Not playing ball with the big guys now is like the sites in 1999 that put ‘robots.txt no follow’ designations on all their webpages. Your site will be isolated from the melee but readers will hate you. At the end of the day, aligning with one or all three of the proprietary initiatives probably makes sense but consider a) that handing over your customers to fb/Google isn’t much different than handing over your content and b) MySpace (of course) is a sister company to HarperCollins.
Dataportability.org and the Bright Shiny Promise of Open Standards
If at this point you are gritting your teeth — thinking this is yet another thing to take care of — and generally feeling backed into a corner (again) by a bunch of industry outsiders then I have news for you. Before Google, MySpace, or Facebook got moving on their own proprietary schemes for porting user ids and data around, there was Dataportability.org. You guessed it, it is a public organization dedicated to establishing open data portability standards. It is a grass-roots initiative. And it is at the intersection of RSS standards, openID standards, open addressbook standards, open calendar standards, and open standards for opinions, ratings and reviews (just to name a few).
The great thing about Dataportability.org is that it is federated. You don’t need to rollover or go to court to play a part. The not so great thing about Dataportability.org is that federation is hard work and that work is just getting started. The organization now needs to make its way between three larger (and more aggressive) private players and still deliver something acceptable and useful for the greater community.
Dataportability.org Needs Volunteers
If you have made it all the way to the end of this post then maybe you would consider getting involved with the organization. Dataportability.org needs a single person from the publishing industry to act as a point of contact for future initiatives. If you an organizer with a passion for books then please volunteer. Their next initiative — hopefully helped along by the new organizer — is to gather a group of industry volunteers together for a taskforce on standards. This taskforce would likely intersect with initiatives from the idpf.org and bisg.org but you don’t need to be an insider to join. If you are interested in joining the task force or being the organizer contact me below.
See also
The Dataportability.org taskforce for the Health Care Industry
How Facebook Could Help Publishers and Booksellers [GalleyCat]
Facebook Connect Vs. OpenID: The Format War for Your Identity [Masters of Media]
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