How much are your friends worth? That is the question behind the big debate going on around social networks and data portability. In the last ten days, Facebook, Google, and MySpace have all announced ways to let people access their data (including friends lists) from other sites, except that what they are really trying to do is erect new walled gardens by positioning themselves as the primary repository of that personal and social data. This is valuable data and none of the big players want to cede any more of it than is necessary, which is why Facebook banned Google from tapping into its members’ social data.

But here’s a little secret. All of this data is already leaking out in ways that Facebook and other social networks can hardly control. Startups are finding ways around their official APIs to get the data consumers want into their own systems. For instance, Zude, a personalized Webpage service, recently launched a feature called SocialMix that lets people import friends lists, photos, profile information, status updates, comments, and other data from Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, Orkut, and hi5. (See the screen shot below, which shows my Facebook friends on Zude). “What we are doing is taking the information and normalizing it and making it available in any manner you want,” claims Zude CTO Steve Repetti. He was tired of waiting around for true data portability to arrive, so he figured out a hack to offer it on his own (and it doesn’t involve screen scraping).

Taking a different approach, Minggl has found a way to access your social data through a browser plug-in. And Media6° is placing cookies through the ads themselves on Facebook to collect social data for advertisers. If you click on an ad with one of its cookies, then the same ad will be shown to all of your friends, who supposedly are two to ten times more likely to click on the ad than other people. Media6° also should be able to target Facebook members as they wander across the Web (as long as a cookie has been placed in their browsers and they come across an ad with the Media6° Javascript code embedded in it).

I’ve come across other startups who claim to be able to pull profile and friend data from Facebook. Facebook can go after them and shut them down, but it is rightly more concerned about Google gaining free and unfettered access to that data. Google is the bigger competitor and the bigger threat. But in the meantime, all of these little startups are finding ways to get at the same social data being so ferociously guarded by Facebook. In fact, they already have it, and Facebook is going to have a hell of a time trying to put it back in the barn.

(Photo by Larry Wilder).

It’s almost painful to write about a social news aggregator these days. We’ve covered well over a dozen of them, most of which do nearly the exact same thing. It’s getting ridiculous. With so many on the market, it goes without saying that most of these are going to fade into obscurity in the next six months.

Which is why I hope Minggl was telling the truth when they told us they weren’t just another event aggregator.

Because right now, that’s basically what Minggl is. They currently offer a browser-based plugin for both Firefox and Internet Explorer that integrates a newsfeed, among other things. After filling out requisite information for MySpace, Facebook, and most of the other major social networking sites, users are also given one-click access to each of their profile pages from their Minggl toolbar. Other features include the ability to mass-send a status message to each network (provided they support one), and the ability to send the same message to friends across multiple networks.

To be honest, I was surprised by how well the sidebar feature worked. I generally detest browser plugins, but the Minggl toolbars did their job without being too intrusive. There are, however, a few annoying quirks that got on my nerves after a while. Whenever you visit a friend’s profile while logged into Minggl, a floating box appears asking if you’d like to add them as a Minggl friend. I’m sure there is (or will be) a setting to turn this off, but it shouldn’t be the default. Minggl also needs to get away from banner ads, which are integrated into their newsfeed sidebar – it just looks tacky.

Besides Minggl’s semi-unique plugin approach to the social aggregator, the company says they have a few more things up their sleeves. First, they plan to offer a set of filters that will allow users to prune their newsfeeds down to the stories that they find most important. If they do it right, this could be a big stepping stone for them, as many of these aggregators often devolve into chaos. Minggl says that they’ve also established a robust infrastructure, and hope to become a social networking platform in the future.

Minggl’s going to have a tough time in the social news aggregator space. They are very similar to MySocial 24×7, a Firefox extension for FriendFeed that we recently covered. If they want to do well, they’re going to have to quickly establish what makes them different, or they will sink with the others.