TechCrunch is reporting that MySpace is announcing a broad ranging embrace of data portability standards today, along with data sharing partnerships with Yahoo, Ebay, Twitter and their own Photobucket subsidiary. The new project is being called MySpace “Data Availability” and is an example, MySpace says, of their dedication to playing nice with the rest of the Internet.

A mockup of how the data sharing will look in action with Twitter is shown above. MySpace is essentially making key user data, including
*Publicly available basic profile information,
*MySpace photos,
*MySpaceTV videos, and
*friend networks, available to partners via their (previously internal) RESTful API, along with user authentication via OAuth.

Twitter could use the data to recommend other Twitter users who are your MySpace friends (luckily I have only a few friends on Myspace). I think this a good move in the right direction of the concept of data portability. It could be win/win/win for all participating parties.

I would imagine not too many people on myspace are currently on twitter (but they could come racing over if myspace promotes this properly). I hope twitter is ready for such an influx of new users and dramatic increase on their network.

Twitter needs to be careful about allowing too many changes to occur on thier site. They sure as heck don’t want to take on the feel of myspace.

While myspace beats facebook to the punch with this there are currently ways that you can use your facebook credentials and share some of your data outside of facebook. As an example you can login to a 3rd party site with your Facebook credentials, and a user account is created on the 3rd party site with your Facebook information. Look at 83degrees as an example.

Technorati Tags: twitter, myspace

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