Why this flurry of activity in opening up APIs for 3rd party apps? All these initiatives will allow securely sending personal profile data, including friend lists, presence/status information, etc., to third party applications. The primary benefit of these services is to allow users to maintain a single friends list and to coordinate social activities across different sites that perform different services.

“The reason these companies are are rushing to get products out the door is because whoever is a player in this space is likely to control user data over the long run. If users don’t have to put profile and friend information into multiple sites, they will gravitate towards one site that they identify with, and then allow other sites to access that data. The desire to own user identities over the long run is also causing the big Internet companies, in my opinion, to rush to become OpenID issuers (but not relying parties).”

While the motivations are good (I don’t need to sign up everytime I visit a new website), there are bound to be privacy issues. Wait for one 3rd party to mess it up, willingly or unwillingly.

And the biggest gain for Google? They would now be able to target ads on individual profile level. Is that good? I am not too sure how much info I’d like to share with anyone, be it Google, Facebook, Myspace, Yahoo, Twitter…

Let’s wait and see.

Tags: apis, data availability, google, myspace, personal profile data, privacy issues, profile level, third party, Yahoo