Facebook users can carry profiles with them

SAN FRANCISCO: Facebook is loosening its grip on millions of personal profiles to allow inhabitants of its popular internet hangout to transplant the information and applications to other websites.

With the changes, Facebook joins a growing movement to make it easier for people to share their favourite pictures, information and applications with family and friends anywhere on the Internet.

Facebook unveiled its plans the day after its bigger rival, MySpace, made a similar commitment.

Unlike MySpace, Facebook plans to allow users to take their personal profiles to any website that wants to host them. For starters, MySpace is opening user profiles only to a select group of sites, including leading destinations owned by Yahoo and eBay.
Both Facebook and MySpace say several weeks remain before their users’ data becomes portable.

The transition poses a risk for Facebook and MySpace because they are effectively tearing down the barriers that sequestered the personal profiles on their sites. This so-called “walled-garden” approach kept people coming back to the sites and sticking around, creating a magnetism that appeals to advertisers. But pressure to offer portable profiles has been building as people have embraced the internet as a convenient way to swap personal information and interests.

Internet search leader Google Inc. waded into the fray last year by creating a network that’s supposed to make it easier to share music, pictures, video and other personal interests on a range of online hangouts.

MySpace joined the Google system, known as OpenSocial, but Facebook hasn’t.