Yesterday MySpace announced the availability of, well, Data Availability, their contribution to the data portability movement. Back in May, MySpace made the announcement that they were making user data available to Yahoo, ebay and Twitter. Now they’ve opened up to developers.

What’s Available?

After using oAuth to authenticate a user and retrieve an authorized Access Token and Token Secret, the API allows third party developers access to the following myspace data:

In addition, the API allows developers access to the user’s friends through a simple GET request:

http://api.myspace.com/people/@me/@friends

The response will only return the ID of the user’s friends.

In Use

After announcing MySpace Data Availability, the good people at TechCrunch threw an application together to demonstrate how it works:

Step One: Go to the app and click a link to install the application in myspace.

Step Two: On myspace, confirm that you’d like to give the application access to your MySpace data.

Step Three: You’re now redirected back to the TechCrunch app, which can now display your myspace profile data information.

The Catch

Even though developers can now display users’ myspace data on their sites, that doesn’t mean they can actually do anything with the data. In fact, myspace forbids storing or caching any of the user information. So aside from displaying what’s already at myspace, Data Availability isn’t particularly useful unless the developer can do on-the-fly data analysis in order to present something based on what they’ve learned from the user data. Which is, you know, not easy.

What Does This Mean To DataPortability?

Data Availability sure sounds like Data Portability, doesn’t it? And it’s certainly allowing data to leave the silo that is MySpace. Due to the fact that 3rd party developers cannot store or save data, each page load synchs with the mothership, guaranteeing up-to-date information.

But then again, it’s just a display. A one way road from myspace to display somewhere else. Users can’t edit their myspace information on another site, and nothing about it is bidirectional.

So is Data Availability a step forward for the Data Portability movement? Is it a step backward? To me, it’s a step. When it comes to true data portability, it helps to be patient. Until recently the thought of allowing another site to access your profile data was absurd. Back in the walled-garden days, independent silos with redundant profile data were the rule. With Data Availability, a giant in social networking has decided to open the gate a little bit. That’s a very good thing.

Talking this over with Trent Adams, the founder of matchmine and an active contributor to the DataPortability Project, he pointed out what might be helpful as next steps:

“The move by MySpace into the world of data portability with their Data Availability initiative is a great baby step. Without something like what Drummond Reed and his XDI compatriots are cooking up, though, it’s going to be hard to take bigger steps. Specifically, the concepts of identity, data, and control cry out for what’re termed link contracts.”

Trent recently interviewed Drummond for his DataPortability In-Motion podcast, where they talk about XDI, XRI, and link contracts in detail.

It’s impossible for me to believe that we’re going to go from nothing to everything. I don’t think facebook will put out a press release tomorrow announcing an API to let any developer create apps to both read, store, and write to any part of a facebook profile. It’s just not going to happen. When it comes to data portability, iteration is the name of the game. Give developers a little bit of access and see what happens. Then, little by little, give more access.