There's a whole lot of talk these days about the need for open interfaces so people can move their data across various social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace.

That's all well and good but while we're on the subject of open interfaces might it not be worth considering opening up the back end of these services. From a user's perspective, part of the problem with all these various Web sites that house my content is that none of it is integrated. Imagine a world for a minute where you stores data on say a Yahoo application only to see that same data available to Microsoft application service.

That could theoretically happen if all services made available an open interface that would allow users to store data on third-party storage-as-a-service offering. That service would essentially be a hard drive in the cloud that could serve data up to any application, whether it resided in the cloud or on my local machine.

In theory, this could also help the application service providers in the cloud save money on storage because people would be using storage services they pay for instead of relying on each service provider to purchase mountains of storage devices. In fact, we already moving in this general direction given the plethora of storage-as-a-service options that are coming to market.

This may not be the most popular idea in the world with application service providers that fixated on capturing as much data as possible in order to better target marketing offerings. That's all well and fine, but that natural of order of things is to provide a better service by making it more convenient for people to use and access a service. Of course, the people that house our data may know a lot more about us than any particular application provider so they may have a strategic advantage over say a company that only provides a particular set of applications. But at the end of the day, there ability to mine that data with my permission might actually generate offers that we find useful versus most of the crap that gets served up today. At the very least, it couldn't be much worse.