Mashable has a guest post this week from “Drama 2.0” (an anonymous tech blogger), titled, Data Portability is boring. It’s a response to comments made by Tim Berners-Lee in this interview a while back, including the following lines:

I think, it is a very grown-up thing to realize that you are not the only social networking site. When you do that, it is like a website that all of a sudden… otherwise it is like a website which doesn’t have any links out. In the Semantic Web similarly, if you don’t have any links out, well, that’s boring.

Not very well phrased, but the essence is that if you’re a social networking site and you don’t do data portability, that’s boring (annoying might have been a more appropriate adjective).

Our drama queen says that, in fact, data portability itself is boring. By this he means that, even though bloggers, entrepreneurs and geeks get all excited about it, mere mortals couldn’t care two cents:

From what I’ve seen, it’s really only a small but vocal portion of the Internet population comprised primarily of technologists and Web 2.0 kool aid sippers who are beating the drum for data portability.

The truth is that the average mainstream Internet user doesn’t look at Facebook as a warehouse for data… I’m sure users wouldn’t complain if there was an easy way to take certain data from one service to another, but by in large, I think the technologists pushing for data portability are trying to supply something that there isn’t a whole lot of demand for.

I think this is true for many users today, who are perfectly satisfied with Facebook or MySpace (or some other platform of choice). But what happens if their current platform starts to move in a direction they don’t like, or something measurably better comes along? One doesn’t have to be a power-user of social networking applications to want occasionally to move from one to another or to establish a presence on more than one at once. And data portability serves that need just as well as it does those of the uber-social networkers.

Ultimately, I go back to my own main beef about all this which is that the lack of data portability is simply an artificial barrier to exit, allowing companies to rely on the ownership they have of people’s data rather than on positive competitive differentiation in order to keep their customer base “loyal”. As such, it’s a sign of insecurity as much as anything else. And for that reason alone, it should be highlighted and criticised. Now, if data portability does become available for more sites, it will disproportionately benefit the power users. But it will also benefit the mere mortals who might find the concept “boring” but will appreciate its effects.

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