Social networking sites and data portability over the web

Facebook is ready with Facebook Connect, a new technology for members to connect their profile data and authentication credentials to external websites.

Facebook Connect will launch within the next few weeks.

The new feature was disclosed on the company's blog. Facebook Connect would make it possible for developers to build applications that connect to Facebook from other websites. Facebook users, however, would maintain control over their personal data and would have to agree to share it.

Facebook said it believed data portability over the web was more than just moving data. "It's about giving users the ability to take their identity and friends with them around the web, while being able to trust that their information is always up to date and always protected by their privacy settings," the company said.

For its part, social networking site MySpace is to allow its users to share their information with other websites, as per the information available. The site is now planning on broadening access to Yahoo, Twitter, eBay and Photobucket as part of its "data availability" project. Anyone with a MySpace profile will now be able to share photographs, video clips, lists of friends and information about themselves with other sites. Under MySpace's initiative, users will be able to go to a central privacy control panel on the site and chose the information they want to share and the sites they want to share it with. Initially, users will be able to share their basic profile information, photos, personal videos, and friend lists, as per the information available.