I think privacy is actually a good reason for strong data portability. If users can easily leave your service for another, you have a strong incentive not to violate their privacy expectations. To extrapolate that point out: strong data portability and interoperability encourage a competitive environment.
I think you're conflating "closed" with "private." An open social networking environment can still harbor private (I would argue more private) sharing contexts.
From what I understand, it's not an easy process and you can't download important stuff, like your social graph (I think you only get plaintext names, not email addresses, etc.)
Not to mention the graph api. They're very good about giving you all the information you as a user might want (photos, links, messages, wall posts) What it doesn't give you is the kind of data that a competitor might want.
It gives you most of the data you'd be interested in as a user (photos, videos, messages, wall posts). Not so much the data that Google might want, like a easily importable graph. But for everyone else, it's really useful.
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I think privacy is actually a good reason for strong data portability. If users can easily leave your service for another, you have a strong incentive not to violate their privacy expectations. To extrapolate that point out: strong data portability and interoperability encourage a competitive environment.
I think you're conflating "closed" with "private." An open social networking environment can still harbor private (I would argue more private) sharing contexts.
You're absolutely right, I did conflate 'closed' and 'private'.
But what about my second point? You can download your facebook data. Or is it not 'strongly portable' enough, in your opinion?
From what I understand, it's not an easy process and you can't download important stuff, like your social graph (I think you only get plaintext names, not email addresses, etc.)
It's a one click download. OK, actually two clicks, but it's a very clean, unconfusing process. https://www.facebook.com/download/
Not to mention the graph api. They're very good about giving you all the information you as a user might want (photos, links, messages, wall posts) What it doesn't give you is the kind of data that a competitor might want.
You should try it. http://www.facebook.com/download. It's basically a two-click process.
It gives you most of the data you'd be interested in as a user (photos, videos, messages, wall posts). Not so much the data that Google might want, like a easily importable graph. But for everyone else, it's really useful.