Cross Networking Madness: Strategies for portability of data and identity and how to leverage them to grow your community.

Issues with data portability:

• Data formats

o Need format that is both meaningful and useful
o Competitive issues with providing data portability, may benefit the competition

• RSS Feeds are portability lite

o Not as well adopted as you would think

• Widgets are another form of portability lite
• Friendfeed

• Security and portability issues

• There aren’t any great models for best practices in data portability. Everyone talks about it, but it’s mostly more talk than reality.

• Social Network Fatigue – It’s not so much that it’s hard to get people to register on a site, it’s getting them to keep up on your site.

• Creating niche communities. Each niche community only represents a facet of a person. How do we pool all of these things together so that you’re well represented.

Multiple interfaces to integration.

Identify your integration target.

• Active and passive integration.

o Synchronous vs. asynchronous integration

Twine – You can post everywhere.
Hellotext – Repeat post for you.

Reasons for interest in this issue:

How to drive traffic to your site and montetize your own community.

Facebook works well as an acquisition channel, but not a great way of generating revenue.

Clay: You need to go out to your customer, can’t wait for them to get to you.

Example of good cross-networking. Ebay Storefront API. It made it very easy to integrate your own site with eBay. Their usership exploded when they published their robust storefront API.

Not a whole lot of optimism in the immediate viability of data portability and identity. Lots of talk, but no great action.

Everyone felt data portability was too immature.

Michael Staton didn’t feel that integration of his app with Facebook to be worth it in terms of ROI so far.

Data portability is perceived as risky. Organizations large orgs are particularly risk averse.

Tip: Don’t be creepy.

Trust can be an issue with shared ids. You may need to gain trust before you can swap info.

Need a leader to get OpenID going.

Key Takeaways:

1) Is the holy grail, but a chimera?
2) Different forms of profitability - low tech (rss) vs. hi-tech
3) Be a good neighbor - share data to get data
4) ROI models are uncertain