Sunil Urs

Today MySpace has announced their “Data Availability” initiative along with data sharing partnership with Yahoo, EBay, Twitter and Photobucket. Here the key goal is to allow users to use their personal data on other networks and applications. As a simple example, one can display his MySpace profile on other networks. I will be very happy if I can change my profile info on MySpace and it gets automatically updated on LinkedIn, Orkut, Facebook, etc… Though it is not possible currently, it may happen in near future.

They are calling it as “Data Availability” rather than “Data Portability”. And it makes more sense as the third parties are held to strict terms of service, which prohibits them from storing / using the data once the permissions are revoked. So the data is dynamic. You fetch the data when ever it is required, use it and forget it.

It can lead to interesting applications

When it comes to the application, MySpace’s partnership with EBay can lead to some interesting features on EBay wherein once people buy a product on EBay, they can spread the word to all their friends, tell them what they feel about the product, then recommend the product to others. This will allow products to spread virally. Hmmm… Social Shopping!!.. Though this is not completely new, partnership between MySpace and EBay is going to be an interesting thing. MySpace can meet its revenue targets with this initiative. Currently as the Data Sharing is only between the partners, even EBay will be happy to pay them for this exclusivity.

As Michael Arrington says, MySpace has got a clear lead over Facebook this time.