Data Portability Games: Australian Faraday Media Pushes Web Agenda in U.S.
The “open” excitement yesterday was deafening. After all, a BOMBSHELL was unleashed into the blogosphere, as ex TechCruncher and now Read/Write Webber Marshall Kirkpatrick pre-announced, along with fellow pre-briefed TechCruncher Duncan Riley’s second, to eager, ready to regurgitate bloggers.
“Today changes everything,” TechCrunch advised, thanks to a carefully orchestrated, ”co-exclusive” organized by a five-person, Australian, venture financed startup keen on pushing its own Web agenda on the U.S. Internet market, Faraday Media.
Despite the suggestively neutral and seemingly non-profit.org URL of the “Data Portability Workgroup,” DataPortability.org is SPONSORED BY FARADAY MEDIA, corporate promoters of numerous Web products and services: particls, engagd, SyncStream…Faraday Media’s Website giddily features TechCruncher Kirkpatrick gushing over their products and its “Data Portability Workgroup” blog post yesterday, following TechCrunch and ReadWrite Web pre-announcements, bestows link love on the TechCrunch and ReadWrite Web high fives.
For a company that positions itself, its products and the industry consortium it seeks to spur, on a vaunted notion of transparency, Faraday Media’s “DataPortability.org” is non-transparent to the users it claims to be helping. Faraday Media is nevertheless crystal clear on its corporate agenda: To be the definitive “epicenter of the attention ecosystem.” BUT, how does Faraday Media’s creation and evangelizing of the “Data Portability Workgroup,” support its own product roadmap and corporate agenda?
Faraday Media’s sponsored DataPortability.org can now claim a Facebook staffer, a Google staffer and a Plaxo staffer as “Workgroup” members. YAHOO?
Hardly! Contrary to the image portrayed by the not-so-open and not-so-transparent, exclusively pre-briefing of ecasty-complying TechCrunch and ReadWrite Web, such announcements of prospective competitor sit downs are NOT so earth shattering.
Particularly troubling is the non-user friendly DataPortability.org Website and affiliated collateral. Despite tech geeks gone wild for an unconsumated prospective collaboration between Google, Facebook, Plaxo, Robert Scoble…the average user, for which the entire DataPortability.org effort is supposedly about, undoubtedly finds the Faraday Media sponsored Website and associated collateral a maze of geek speak and unabashed promotion of Faraday’s “Data Portability Project.”
What’s more, the average user is undoubtedly unaware that “the history of the Internet” is poised to be rewritten as of January 8, 2008, thanks to Faraday Media, ReadWrite Web and TechCrunch.
ReadWrite Web commenter Eran Hammer-Lahav deflates the Faraday Media fueled hot air ballon:
The Data Portability Workgroup has by far produced the least amount of progress in the open web space. It is a group of some of the best and dedicated thinkers in this space, but even after participating in the conversation for a little bit, I still don’t understand what they are really trying to do. What their deliverable are.
If I was Facebook, and I wanted to do some damage control or PR for being open and nice, the Data Portability Workgroup would be the perfect effort to join. After all, go try to figure out what Facebook has actually agreed to? And Facebook can already say they support data portability (its bidirectional portability they have an issue with).
By itself, this means nothing. If anything, it can make the Data Portability Workgroup weaker if after this big hoopla, nothing comes out of it. There is nothing worse than unattainable expectations.
ALSO: 2008 Social Media Warning: Beware Google AND Facebook and Facebook vs. Google: The Real Tech President Political Power Plays and Reach Local Advertising? How Google Squeezes SEMs and AdWords Buyers and Web 2.0 Social Power Grab: Will Faraday Media Open Up? and Henry Blodget Braces For ‘Harder Times’: Silicon Alley Insider ‘Screwed’?