Live and learn. After my recent post musing about who owns Facebook — the college students who were the original targets or the businesspeople who’ve started to swarm the site — I heard from some people who clued me in on the work of the Data Portability Workgroup, which would allow social-network visitors to migrate their personal data among — and connect to audiences in — many different sites. It maintains my faith in the concept that, if I sense a need for something, there’s a darn good chance someone’s already been working on it. I’ll never be mistaken for a brilliant entrepreneur…

John Battelle took Facebook to task in a recent blog posting for presumably fighting the efforts of the Data Portability Workgroup. Facebook responded saying it’s committed to giving users control of their data on Facebook, but stopped short of committing to a completely open approach to portability. In fact, Facebook announced on Jan. 8 that it’s joining the workgroup. Some seem not to believe in Facebook’s commitment.

But the data portability situation brings up another issue: customer loyalty and “stickiness,” that overused term referring to the ability of a site or platform — or for that matter, a brick-and-mortar retail outlet — to maintain customers once they acquire them. With the ability to transport your profiles and experiences from one site to another with relative ease, a whole new concern arises for social networks and Web sites. If MySpace was concerned about losing audience to Facebook because of image, imagine the landscape when people can pack their bags and move on to the flavor of the month (or day, or hour) with relative ease. Salespeople say that the cost of acquisition (or reacquistion) of a customer is higher than the cost of retention; the same logic likely holds for retaining audiences on social networking sites. It’ll be interesting to see what these companies do to attract and retain fickle audiences once data portability becomes a standard. It was sad to see reputable news organizations pander to the common denominator with stories about celebutantes and video of stupid pet tricks when they began to battle for audience (because of the asinine business model based on pageviews, but that’s a blog for another day). Will social networking sites stoop to a lowbrow approach in an effort to build and maintain audiences? If so, I’ll be looking for other venues.

Hmm, maybe that’s a need someone isn’t working on right now…