The overarching theme of the SiloSync Survey was that people really want to back up their data from Facebook!
Since the results were in order of preference and the questions could all have multiple answers, caries I made a simple scoring scheme. I assigned 5 points for the first answer, medicine 4 for the second, etc.. The 5th answer and beyond were all 1 point.
The results:
What would you use SiloSync for?
- 24 points – Backing up data
- 13 points – Leaving a social network if it gets shady
- 8 points – Keeping profiles on multiple social networks in sync
- 4 points – Quickly joining new social networks w/o re-setting up
Those results were amusing since the whole mainstream-blogosphere data-portability argument seems to be focused on the lowest-ranking result. Basically small startups want to take away Facebook’s edge so they’re pushing that one the hardest (I don’t blame them). It’s good to have some actual input from users so I can make SiloSync the best possible!
Onto which social networks the respondents were interested in:
Which sites would you like to be able to grab data FROM?
- 27 points – Facebook
- 11 points – WordPress
- 7 points – LinkedIn
- 6 points – Blogger
- 5 points – GMail & Flickr
- 3 points – LiveJournal, Voicemail
- 1 point – Twitter
No suprise that Facebook dominated that one. MySpace got served: no one even mentioned it. MySpace also got ignored in the next section on exporting data. However, keep in mind that this section isn’t too important since the people surveyed indicated that they are much more interested in getting their data out than sending it other places.
Where would you like to be able to export your data TO?
- 17 points – LinkedIn
- 11 points – Facebook
- 8 points – Twitter & SiloXML (ie: an open XML format)
- 5 points – Gmail
- 4 points – Pedlr
- 3 points – WordPress
- 2 points – Blogger
- 1 point – LiveJournal
There you have it! Everyone hearts Facebook a whole-bunch but doesn’t trust them one iota with their personal data. It’s a good thing too because they’re riddled with security flaws (but that’s for another post) and pull stuff like the NewsFeed & Beacon.
Big thanks to everyone who took the survey for me. It helps a ton when approaching a project this large to know which parts are desired the most.
… guess I’d better get to work on SiloSync now, huh?