Incongruous Balderdash

The last fortnight has seen many developments in the online social communities.

Microsoft Zune upgraded its social feature to a new level with the ability to see what your friends are listening and even download their Zune cards onto the devices. It is a very nice feature to discover new music since you do not have to search for the top 10 or maybe 100 songs on radio - just go online on your social page, look what your friends are listening and have an option to buy or lease that song.

Check out my Zune social page

Facebook Connect will provide the hooks to let users port their friends, profile photos, events, and other data across the Web to partner sites.

MySpace on Thursday announced Data Availability, with Yahoo, eBay, Photobucket, and Twitter as initial partners for its effort to let members port their data.

Yahoo is partnering with the leading social networks so its users can take advantage of the freeing of user data, and it will also be crafting its own social network and APIs as part of its forthcoming Yahoo Open Strategy.

Even Google does not want to lag behind and is expected to join the social network data portability crowd with “Friend Connect” on Monday

If you read in between the lines, it means that these sites are basically allowing external sites to use your publicly available information on their networks. This may mean that we get more integrated services but raises serious security issues. I do not know how Facebook and Myspace manage their data but I’ve enabled a bare minimum of applications on those sites to protect my privacy.

Google’s Orkut, on the other hand actually lets the user know how those applications will access the users information. The Orkut applications will have:

1) Access to your publicly available profile information and your friends list
2) Share your publicly available information with other viewers and users of this application
3) Get a link in your left navigation bar
4) Put a gadget on your profile page

I do not mind that last 2 points but why should my friends information be shared with Google’s partners? I can understand that my information is shared because I agreed to add that application to my profile. Why drag my friends into all this?

I am a bit skeptical about all this. I joined orkut in the first place because of its clean interface and no nonsense social features (meet with friends, scrap them and connect). Now its aiming to be the next facebook or MySpace and miserably failing at maintaining the same clean user interface that lured me to Orkut. Add security issues to this and I’m thinking - Is it time to pull the plug on my profile ??

What are your thoughts about this?