

Ask YC | Your thoughts on social websites and data portability - iamelgringo

With all the recent discussion of Scoble pulling his data from Facebook and getting banned, I've been thinking a lot about data portability on websites.<p>What are people's thoughts on allowing users to export their data in XML format?  It seems fairly simple and straight forward to do; there are XML libraries for pretty much every language out there.   Why not do it?
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bayareaguy
I'm disappointed that we haven't heard much from the 5,000 people on Scoble's
list. I'm sure at least one of them considers the stuff he downloaded to be
"theirs".

Along those lines I think any XML for this should have plenty of attributes to
track exactly who entered the data along with its redistribution terms. It
should at the very least have the flags described here:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=95078>

