What do you think is more important for the web industry to solve - data portability or interoperability?
First, some definitions of these terms that are often used interchangeably in social networking speak:
Data Portability = taking your data from one social networking site (ex. profile info, friend contact info) and moving it a different social networking site or service.
Interoperability = letting users from one social networking site communicate (ex. share files, push/pull content) with users on another social networking site.
Here are some examples of each:
Data Portability includes Robert Scoble using a script to export his Facebook contacts to Plaxo, and a Facebook app I wrote to import your LinkedIn profile into Facebook.
Interoperability would let Facebook users "talk" to Myspace users. (sorry, there isn't a great example of this just yet... but wait a few months)
So what is more interesting to church and ministry communities of the future? Data portability or interoperability?
Here's a great quote on this issue from Microsoftee, Dare Obasanjo
"The data portability folks want to make it easy for you to jump from service to service. I want to make it easy for users of one service to talk to people on another service. Can you imagine if email interoperability was achieved by making it easy for Gmail users to export their contacts to Yahoo! mail instead of it being that Gmail users can send email to Yahoo! Mail users and vice versa?"
And here's a great conference I'll be attending to discuss this issue with others working in this space.
- Joe Suh from MyChurch.org
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