As Google, MySpace and Facebook battle to become the primary gatekeeper of user data portability, TechCrunch's Erick Schonfeld points out that friend data is already being leaked out of their Web
sites unbeknownst to them. "Startups are finding ways around their official APIs to get the data consumers want into their own systems," he said.
Steve Repetti, CTO of Zude, a personalized
Web page service, said he was tired of waiting for "true data portability" to arrive, so Zude came out with SocialMix, a feature lets users import friends lists, photos, profile information, status
updates, comments and other data from Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, Orkut and hi5. "What we are doing is taking the information and normalizing it and making it available in any manner you want," Repetti
said. Media6, another startup, leverages social data by placing cookies on Facebook ads to collect social data for advertisers. Its technology remembers if you click on an ad, and then serves the same
one to all of your friends, who are "two to 10 times more likely" to click on it, too, according to the company.
Facebook can go and shut these companies down, but the greater concern is
Google, which crawls the entire Web, gaining free access to that data. Even so, "Facebook is going to have a hell of a time trying to put (the social data) back in the barn," he said.
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