Facebook is building a moat around its castle to keep the search giant out.

Dear Google, Facebook’s Just Not That Into You
http://blog.searchenginewatch......516-110559

@rloughery
By paying someone, you are hopefully getting the ability to enforce the terms of service and privacy policy. The commercial service allows you to expect certain things, but it is also the nature of supply and demand that allow companies to charge for certain services. Granted there should be some level of data backup, but that may not be guaranteed.

“An alternate solution would be to allow people to own their personal information store, and choose to allow social network sites access to this store. Sites that behaved badly could be banned. This is much like OpenID and Oauth in concept, where one’s identity is tied to a DNS-like way of creating a single namespace for unique user identifiers. It could take the form of a fancier version of an “Attention Profile Markup Language” file; a “Social Profile Markup Language” file, say. It would be stored on my own web server and under my direct control. If I wanted to share with Friendfeed or mybloglog (for example) what sites I’ve been posting to, saving, liking, or reading, I could allow them to access my SPML file under the condition that it be removed if I decided not to use the application any longer. (This is a geeky solution, but that’s usually where these things start.) There should be a better solution to the new portability of social data than exists today, or my own understanding of my personal information will mean less and less.”