Months, maybe a year ago I made the recommendation that Nexopia develop a product to “import” profiles from other websites. This was of course brushed off as “hard to do” and “illegal” because it would require the scraping of data from other social networks. There was also the issue of privacy and our lead developer refused to ever ask a user for their password to another site.
Things have changed a little bit since then. Nexopia does friend searches from other services but there isn’t any real reason for someone to come to Nexopia and spend time building a complex profile.
Enter Data Portability. DP is
DataPortability is a group created to promote the idea that individuals have control over their data by determing how they can use it and who can use it. This includes access to data that is under the control of another entity.
With major sites like Digg, MySpace, and now Facebook introducing new methods for data portability it won’t hard to move yourself across domains. Throw in OpenID and you’ve got a good formula for letting new users come to your site quickly and efficiently.
My recommendation for Nexopia to start growing again is to keep an eye on these major players and when they open themselves up you should be waiting with a “1-click sign up” where your entire profile is created without you touching it.
Update: I changed the title to reflect the post and fixed some spelling errors.
May 14th, 2008 at 6:01 pm
I think this is an awesome idea, and I myself use Nexopia very often! I and all for it