Up until now we have been forced to stay with particular services, despite them being terrible, unusable and useless. The reason we hang around? Because the net time cost of moving to a better service is insurmountably high. It is this high cost which keeps services and sites, which are otherwise outdated and useless, in the game (example: Hotmail).
 
Consider a world where this isn’t an issue. Imagine being able to host all your personal information from a single data store. No more constant updating of your multitude of profiles and no more barriers to just leaving a service for something better.

Introducing – DataPortability.org, an open source set of standards and APIs which allow for applications and websites to migrate data between them (within the limits set-out by the user). So, this means, no more pesky signup screens. Simply quote your unique code and password and voila! It knows all the info it could ever need… Sigh, I just hope it takes off.

Personally I see a number of short-term, problems with this architecture. Don’t get me wrong, I think it is the way forward but I don’t think that the vast majority of websites will stand up to the tests of the “hot swap” consumers which it will breed. In the long run this is of tremendous value and the usability and utility of websites (and applications) will become increasingly more important with the overall quality of the software out there drastically improving.

Take a look at their video and see what I mean:


DataPortability - Connect, Control, Share, Remix from Smashcut Media on Vimeo.