Jabber and Data Portability
Filed Under (Jabber, Linux) by Florian Jensen on 11-02-2008
Tagged Under : data portability, Jabber, xep
Today I discovered a very interesting initiative. It is about Data Portability.
This might be the future for all websites and internet related applications. As a user, your profile, contacts, photos, videos and any other form of data is stored on the service providers servers. This means, for every website, you need to create a new login, invite all your friends manually to the service, upload your avatar and so on.
The next issue is, that you need to have some trust in the operator of the service, because he stores your password and other personal information.
Why shouldn’t it be possible to use a single login for everything? All your account data is stored and managed by yourself, so that the service providers don’t get hold of your personal information.
There have been some attempts in that direction, such as OpenID, but the Web needs alot more.
As mentioned above, your login, contacts, files should be portable from any service to another.
And this is where Jabber comes in. I would like to be able to migrate my contacts from any Jabber Server to another. Instead of issuing re-invites to everyone, starting with a new roster, you should be able to transport all your data from any service provider to another.
But what about Identity theft? Isn’t that more dangerous if you have your own identity for every service? I.e. one E-mail adress gets hacked, and boom, you loose your identity?
Is this worthy of an XEP?
Think about it 
Tell me what you think.
/Florian Jensen
Links: XSF; DataPortability
Isn’t that was OpenID is supposed to solve?
Well no, as that is just to log in. It doesn’t carry any information about your friends with you.
Why don´t you use the serverless IM http://retroshare.sf.net
there is no need for portability to other servers, it is serverless, jabber 2.
Well, this is more than just IM. It should be everything. But why not use some Jabber based technology to store your friends and personal info?
It doesn’t?
http://openid.net/specs/openid-attribute-exchange-1_0.html
Please learn more about OpenID before saying what it cannot or can do…
Ok, sorry bout that. But that doesn’t store any contact information or does it?
Great post Florian. I’m a co-founder at DataPortability.org and can say that Jabber/XMPP is a technology that can help power DataPortability. As I understand it (I’m not a tech expert), Jabber/XMPP scales quite well while an RSS/pull solution won’t.
For more info, visit http://www.dataportability.org.
Yes, Jabber scales very well. I’ll discuss this with a few other people in the XSF. Maybe we can define an XEP which can handle data portability.