January 24, 2008

Do Google and FaceBook have too much data?

It is a frustrating fact that whenever a person wants to sign up for an account with almost any social networking site or even an email account these days, that the information required by the service varies from the simple username and password to your entire life story. But should you decide to leave the service your data remains.

However there has been an effort by some influential people that could see a universal way of signing up and moving on from various websites, and being able to take your data with you. However this then becomes a sort of data sharing which some people will not be happy with.

We can see this starting to work with Open ID, but until Yahoo decided to join with them their membership was just a drop in the ocean, this is a start but perhaps these websites should be asking their members rather than experts.

Source [FT]