Facebook Joins The DataPortability Workgroup?

I haven't posted in quite some time. Despite my distaste for beacon and Facebook's current direction, I've remained silent. However, amongst the plethora of tech news pouring out of CES, one small snippet piqued my interest in particular.

According to TechCrunch, Facebook has agreed to join the DataPortability Workgroup, along with Plaxo and Google. What? Data Portability? Facebook wants to play nice with everyone all of a sudden? Is this the same Facebook that chastised Plaxo and vaporized Scobleizer?

The extent to which this news is significant is not yet clear. However, this announcement represents a huge leap in the direction toward openness; a direction Facebook has been only inching towards until recently.

Facebook understands that openness is the future. In the long-term, applications that fail to integrate with the constantly evolving and growing social landscape will ultimately fail themselves. Furthermore, any new application will be fighting a steep uphill battle, should its founders choose a proprietary route, as Facebook did.

But does this mean that Facebook's desire for interoperability is good for its longevity? Absolutely not.

You see, Facebook was able to create an immense user-base, despite its proprietary nature. They got through the hard part. Now that they have all these users on their proprietary platform, they're going to open up their borders and allow them to trickle out? If Facebook makes it easy to migrate data to other platforms, switching costs will be so negligible that a mass-exodus would be possible.

I understand where Facebook is coming from. They want to grow and expand. But I'm of the opinion that Facebook is slowly dying anyway, and that allowing data migration only expedites the inevitable.

When you blow air into a balloon, you have to to close off the end to keep the air inside. Facebook is planning to open up the end of their balloon, in hopes that more air will flow in. Is this making any sense to anyone else?

If Facebook continues along this path, its doom will come earlier than I had anticipated. Can Facebook beat Google at its own game? Will it be able to fend off the host of quickly innovating startups biting at specific demographics within its user-base? Time will tell.