Today I attended two sessions related to data portability at the Graphing Social Patterns conference. Here are some notes.

First off — I believe that the problem that Data Portability group is trying to address is real, and deserves to be solved for the users. OpenId aims to enable users to not have multiple password protected accounts all over the place. A world where everyone has an identity that can be verified has huge advantages for both companies and users. Users won’t have to share their email address or prove their unique identity to new sites, and will be able to login and try out new websites much more easily. This in turn is a huge advantage for companies who spent a good marketing budget on trying to figure out how to get users to create an account. And if open id works out, I guess the existing password custodians such as Google, Yahoo, Amazon, Facebook etc. will become identity custodians with a varying degree of user identity verification.

The same goes for personal data such as address information, phone numbers, credit card numbers and so on. However, here things start to get a little murkier. There is value for users to be able to not have to enter their addresses or change them at many different sites. However, unlike a verifiable identity, there are several business models that thrive today on being the custodians of users’ personal data.

Things get even murkier when we start talking about user generated content. This is definitely a huge part of a companies “assets” — so expecting them to freely share it out would bring forth a lot of questions. There are of course questions that I see come up in these panels (e.g., which user really owns which content). But there is more to it. As a user, I may want the ability to take the content I created on one website to another website. A fine idea, and one I support, but it would be hard to get it to reality, I think.

Let us pick an example — Amazon.com reviews. This is user generated content, and I myself have often thought about having the ability to get a hold of all the reviews I’ve written and being able to show them as a part of my online footprint. Now, Amazon terms of service say that once I’ve written a review and given it to them, it pretty much belongs to them. They have the rights to it. I don’t. While I may think it is less than ideal, but one must understand Amazon’s perspective too. These reviews are a huge part of what makes Amazon a unique ecommerce site. They are a large factor in the decision making process on their website. And besides their fulfillment infrastructure, this content makes it harder for a competitor to pose a challenge to them in their space.

Now, why would Amazon suddenly want to make this content available for any other website? Or for that matter, why would anyone want to make such content freely portable to other sites? Don’t they immediately lose their competitive edge — the proverbial barrier to entry that they were aiming to build with this in the first place?

There is definitely a tension here between what might be ideal for users and what might be ideal for the businesses involved. And while as a user I may want all data generated by me to be completely portable, I can’t see why as a business I would want to enable that. And again, as a startup just out the gate, I may be keen to have Amazon do this for their users, so if I offer users something enticing, I may have their reviews from Amazon show up on my site as well. It sure makes the life of a startup that much easier. But the economics of it just don’t make it viable for the players who have the content in the first place.

So, are there scenarios for companies to be willing to share their content? And what kind of content? And under what kind of licensing terms?