• by Gavin O'Malley  @mp_gavin, May 9, 2008

Throwing its hat into the data portability ring, MySpace on Thursday laid out plans to let users share their public profile information, content, and friends lists with participating sites across the Web.

Within several weeks, users will be able to share their information across a network of initial partner sites, including Yahoo, eBay, Twitter and the MySpace-owned photo-sharing site Photobucket.

"MySpace no long exists as an autonomous island on the Internet," MySpace co-founder and chief executive Chris DeWolfe said during a press call Thursday. "This enables a new layer of social activity and a more dynamic Internet."

Rather than updating information across the Web, users can update their profile in one place, and share that information with the other sites. With the new program, users will have control over what information they share and who they share it with.

MySpace will be rolling out a centralized location within the site that allows users to manage how their content and data is made available to third-party sites.

Inside its opt-in framework, MySpace users will be offered the opportunity to share their MySpace profiles with the sites they are visiting. MySpace, and its launch partners, will be allowing users to share content and data including, basic profile information, MySpace photos, MySpaceTV videos, and friend networks.

The data availability initiative will rely on OAUTH and Restful APIs as its core technology.

The initiative is not currently synchronized with OpenID, a standard backed by Yahoo, which lets users maintain a single identity across multiple sites instead of having to create separate IDs and logins around the Web.

Yet, Jim Benedetto, senior vice president of technology at MySpace, said Thursday that MySpace was not opposed to the idea. "We're open to all initiatives," Benedetto said regarding OpenID.

Noticeably absent from MySpace's partner list was rival Facebook. DeWolfe, for his part, said Facebook was welcome.

Thursday's announcement was positioned as the first step of MySpace's larger data portability initiatives in the works.

MySpace's Data Availability is also designed to complement Yahoo's recently announced Yahoo Open Strategy (Y!OS), a company-wide initiative to open Yahoo to application developers, and unlock social connections across the Yahoo network.

"The Yahoo Open Strategy and MySpace Data Availability are a giant leap towards a more social and open Internet," said Ash Patel, executive vice president of platforms at Yahoo. Yahoo has previously collaborated with MySpace on a variety of projects, including the OpenSocial Foundation.

Users who have chosen to share their MySpace content and data with Yahoo Instant Messenger might find their MySpace default photo, interests, and favorite music displayed to their Messenger contacts directly in the IM client. In addition, MySpace users will be able to choose to display their data within Yahoo's universal profile or leverage it in Yahoo Mail's smarter inbox, once those upcoming releases are deployed.

The MySpace effort is just one of several data portability initiatives in the works. Yahoo already operates a similar service with LinkedIn.

In March, Microsoft announced plans to let users of its Windows Live platform share their contact lists with five of the top social networks: Facebook, Bebo, LinkedIn, Tagged and Hi5. The partner sites each agreed to use the Windows Live Contacts application programming interface (API) so members can import Windows Live contacts--most commonly in the form of Hotmail address books--to their sites.

Part of its recently outlined data-portability strategy, Microsoft launched an Invite2Messenger service for users of those social networks to invite their community of "friends" to join Windows Live Messenger.

Also in March, Google rolled out a new Contacts API for developers to access users' Google contacts without them needing to grant full access to their account. Prior to the new API, sites that wanted to harvest users' contact data needed their Gmail log-in information.