Data Portability for Conversations

This past year at Linqia, we have been going deep into the conversations of the web. We have been collecting public conversations from discussion forums and communities such as Facebook Groups and looking across these islands of conversation data for insights. You'll hear more about that area of our work in the months to come.

Back in 2007 I was a founding member of the Data Portability initiative. This is the idea that our data - our contacts, our pictures, our videos, our blog posts, our lifestreams, etc - should not be locked into a single platform. Flickr, for example, is just one application for managing and sharing my photographs. I should be able to open my Flickr photographs in other applications and not be locked into a single site. Data Portability continues to evangelise this principle.

While we were looking at our conversation data we noticed something interesting about Facebook Groups. Facebook Groups are closed. It is not possible to get an RSS feed of new messages to be flowed into a viewing application of choice. So you can't view your Facebook Groups in Google Reader, or Outlook, or FriendFeed. Instead you must go to the Facebook site and explicitly look at them. We could see in our data that Facebook Groups often begin life with an explosion of engagement from their members but then withered before the spammers moved in.

We wanted our Facebook conversation data to be portable. So we created a little app called Group Feed that allowed us to bring in our Facebook Groups to a common place, slice it in different ways using tagging and then consume it via RSS in our application of choice.

So now I can:

• Get a single stream of all my latest Facebook Messages from public groups in RSS format, see new messages in Google Reader and click back into the group to engage when I see something interesting. No more withering groups for me.
• Tag all my startup groups and feed them into a 'startup' label I have in Google Reader.

We are sharing it for your interest. Give it a try and please let us know what you think.

All the data comes from our conversation data store and is accessed via an API that we will be making available to you in the months to come. If you think you can make something awesome with conversation data like this, we can give you something to play with so please drop us a line.