Race To Data Portability: Google Chrome vs. Mozilla Weave
Google announced bookmark sync to the Chrome browser in a blog post earlier today. Chrome users can sync their bookmarks across various machines and store them alongside Google Docs. While the feature is not a new concept amongst browsers, the significance is that yet another player is storing your data in the cloud with the ability to distribute it across networks. As predicted by ReadWriteWeb and Forrester's Jeremiah Owyang, it appears that your social data is converging with the browser with potentially huge implications for data portability.
Similar to Google's Chrome bookmark sync, Mozilla's Weave Sync prototype also allows for continuous synchronization of bookmarks. Weave also offers shared browsing history and saved passwords across multiple machines. Not to be outdone by today's Google Chrome announcement, Mozilla Labs updated its blog with more details on the upcoming Weave 0.6 launch. While the post outlines a number of performance improvements and UI changes, perhaps the most interesting section is the reiteration of the initial Weave concept. Says Ragavan Srinivasan, "Weave, as a Mozilla Labs project, is a collection of experiments around integrating services in/with the browser. The two most active experiments we have going on are related to synchronizing your web experience and integrating identity in the browser."
This commitment to identity integration, coupled with Chrome's move to cloud-based bookmarking, point to the growth of the borderless social web experience - an experience that has been a long time coming. For years we've asked for social network portability and the freedom to manage our own online relationships. With this rising trend towards browser-based service integration and cloud-based data storage, we're one step closer to realizing that dream.
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I am really wondering about Mozilla's focus. With Delicious, Diigo, Digg, FoxMarks, and other bookmarking tools, there are really nice apps to chose from.
For Google this makes sense since they have their own bookmarking tool. But talking about focus, I don't see this being the main competence of a browser--at least not with so many tools already available.
Bookmarks in the cloud aren't anything new — but Chrome bookmark sync is merely the first step in the evolution of Chrome into the thin client for a cloud OS.
The implications for data portability in a world where the browser is the single point of sign-on for all software services is both exciting and troubling.
If a SAAS vendor (like Google) vertically integrates their browser into their software stack, extricating data from that ecosystem might not be impossible, but will most likely be improbable because of the high cost of moving data out of a fully integrated software environment.
It's one thing to store your bookmarks in the cloud, but that is quite unlike storing relationships through your browser in the cloud. That first requires everyone to sign up to the same way of handling identities and relationships, then to find an effective way of handling permissions between users so I can choose where I am connected with the people I know.
W3C are discussing ways to do this and I guess there are two options: either have a centralised "Passport Agency" handling this on behalf of everyone; or produce a set of standards and distribute the task of authority and management.
Either way, I'm unsure hhow relevant the browser will be in all of that, as it would make more sense to add it as an extension to something like OpenID and for your relationship data to be stored with your identity provider, NOT as a browser setting.
Ian Hendry
CEO, WeCanDo.BIZ
http://www.wecando.biz
While it's nice to see that Google and Mozilla are integrating bookmark sync into their browser I don't see it as such a huge step towards data portability. The main problem is that both solutions are tied to their respective vendors by using their services. Thus they do not enable a common protocol but instead they are just extending browsers into the cloud.
(This is at least as I understand it right now although when I looked back at Weave when it started there was also talk about hosting your own bookmark database. Still this is only a solution for a minority of users)
What's needed is really a way for a user to choose where to store bookmarks and having a protocol and API standard for managing that data. Then you might also not add yet another way of storing bookmarks to your already installed solutions like delicious and co. but you can simply reuse those with every browser or even web application.
While I welcome any attempts at finding such a protocol I am nevertheless still waiting for people from delicious, Mozilla, Google and others to join forces to create those standards in order to have true portability at some point in the future.
Disclaimer: I am on the board of the DataPortability Project but this is my personal opinion. But I think this post is more relevant to the concept than to our group anyway.
Hooray. We do not need 21st century AOLs.
I am the lead developer for Weave, but I'm not speaking for Mozilla here.
Weave has always looked to improve data portability, it is one of the guiding principles for the project. Here are some of the ways in which Weave is working on it:
* Weave uses a RESTful protocol which is very easy to implement both new clients and servers for.
* The Weave client and server are both freely available and open source.
* There are plans to implement OAuth (or similar)-based sharing of data stored on Weave.
* Weave records are all JSON objects, which are easy to consume on many platforms (after decryption).
* All development, including changes to the protocol, is discussed in the open, so any 3rd parties maintaining their own server/client have a voice (and a heads up).
The other point I'll make is that Weave encrypts all user data before it is stored on the server; Mozilla does not have access to the data. This makes DP a bit more complicated, but we think security and privacy are just as important as being able to move your data.
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