data portability
Who are these people? That's the problem I've long had with sites like Twitter and eBay, which offer anonymous user names and little else to go by. And that's been the charm of Facebook, which aims to tie online identities with real ones by asking for work and school information, which is harder to fudge than a screen name. Had eBay and Twitter announce a partnership to share data with Facebook, I'd be impressed. Instead, they, as well as Yahoo, have partnered with MySpace instead to share profile data. Buffoonish technopundits are hailing this as an "
advance in data portability." But what does it really mean? Now, in addition to a login like "awesomeguy1980," I'll get to see drunken party snapshots of someone before I reject their Twitter follower request.
Valleywag
Want to see Paris Hilton's MySpace profile? How about Lindsay Lohan's? Don't worry about those pesky privacy settings. Thanks to "data portability," a faddish technology movement that the Valley has been buzzing about for months, you can see any profile you want on MySpace. Byron Ng, a Canadian computer technician with a knack for finding Web security holes, has discovered that Yahoo's integration with MySpace makes it easy to view photos for any profile. These images, which Ng obtained from Hilton's and Lohan's profiles, speak to the danger Yahoo and MySpace's lax data-sharing habits pose:
More »
