Compuserve, Playnet, Prodigy, MSN, AOL, Facebook: just a passing fancy - I propose an uncool XML microformat wallet

Like any celebrity or fad, when it is on fashion there is no imagining life without it at the helm. But once it is outmoded, we all wonder how we became captive of just a short-lived and flashy concept! I cannot help but wonder how useful and revolutionary Facebook has become or will be in the future. I know too many people who have their entire existence on Facebook. For many of them, if they do not say, see, hear, or discuss it on Facebook, then it does not exist. This kind of blind trust feels much like when people used to believe anything they saw on photo or video without question; all while forgetting the fact that any medium is subject to manipulation (that is another story for a different day). Knowing just too many people who are almost solely findable on Facebook, I was and have been made to create a somewhat maintain a Facebook account. Being guarded and non-exhibitionist, I did not post anything significant. Also, I was unsure of what it meant to provide so much personally identifying information and social links to a closed system. We all know, and have been iffy about the ability of private and public organizations (Google, wiretapping agencies, retailers etc) to build pr attempt to build elaborate profiles and datamine these repositories to classify and predict out actions, but the distinction between these organizations and Facebook is that the disclosure with the likes of Facebook is done with a junky-like voluntarism.

The most recent noise and protest about the privacy or 'publicity' policy has made me reflect on my decision to dedicate time to a closed system like Facebook. These systems (Internet Services) are not core technical infrastructure of the Internet, but they are built-upon the infrastructure and have content for a selling proposal. Even if there were no control issues, the quaestion of informationportability (when the system ceases to exist) remains.

Passing Fancy?
My opinion is that Facebook has taken the place of its equally popular predecessors (by percentage in their time) like Compuserve, Prodigy, and AOL; islands of fascinated sub-populations of the Internet that rally around a revolutionary application or idea. Similarly, its time will come to pass as it notably happened for AOL. I single-out AOL because in its day, it was the place to be. Everyone had a profile, being on AIM was almost equivalent to having a name, and other companies were falling over each other trying to build applications that would help them plug into the audience goldmine. Even Time Warner was taken in the storm and ended up buying AOL for billions of dollars (it was large enough to be called a merger) only to see the value disappear in some very short years.

It is clear beyond doubt that a time will come when a new thing will come up that will make Facbook just as popular as MySpace became overnight. My question to my many fields on Facebook is: How portable will your data be the day you will need to move it to the next hot thing? Have you so quickly forgotten that you had to rebuild your profile in Facbook when MySpace webcame "not so hot anymore"? Maybe things like "Diaspora" will solve the privacy issue, but I suggest a more geek and not so enticing solution to all this - Just create an XML compliant microformat of your information and expose it on your website, then control access to this information using an open standard (such as OpenID) and all your friends (even those on Facebook) will be able to authenticate against OpenID to access parts of your microformat using a possible Facebook, MSN, Google, Yahoo, Drupal, Wordpress, etc module or app.