Somebody downvoted you, because you are wrong, but you make a point that's worth debate.

The problem is that nobody cares about Atom. Nobody cares about Media RSS or FriendFeed. The people that use services like that are in the slim minority, because it takes too long to understand, it takes too long to set up, and the biggest problem with open systems is that you don't retain tyrannical control over the information, which hurts your interface.

I've been kind of an outspoken critic of FriendFeed for this reason. It's kind of the culmination of these "open aggregation" sites. The problem is, when you put them all together, you wind up with a slush pile. You get nothing. A bunch of tech-obsessed people will find value; the average user will find nothing.

The theoretical solution is to reverse engineer every single site. That is to say: when I get tagged in a photo on Facebook, then show the tagged photos in the interface. If a friend uploads photos from Facebook and Flickr, then I see both of them - but not as a feed; I see it in a unified photo place. Furthermore, I need to be able to interact with those photos simultaneously. Say I'm looking at a photo gallery that contains photos both from Flickr and Facebook. The system would have to detect duplicates, unify the interface, and make it so that I can both tag the photo and add comments Flickr-style. It would also probably have to detect which comments are coming from what site, so that when I post my reply comments, it doesn't seem like I'm messed-up or out-of-sync - it could add two comment streams, but that's cluttered and messes up the interface.

Now imagine this but for every single site a person would use. Integrated Tweets, Tumblr posts, Facebook notes, possibly Last.FM songs. Most optimally, integrated private messaging between the sites. And the challenge is not getting all that data - as you say, it's publicly available. The problem is unifying that data and producing a comprehensive grasp of it for the user. Facebook can do that easily, because they have complete closed-door control of that information. They know exactly how you'll be commenting on things, they know the actionflow for uploading photos and tagging people in notes and posting items and whathave you. With any attempt to duplicate that openly, you lose that absolute knowledge unless you're brilliant and figure out the one unifying thread between every single site you connect to, and that's a pretty damn tall order.

The people who use FriendFeed as a social hub do not understand what people use social networking for. I've heard this argument a lot, that FriendFeed is a new-wave social hub. It's not. For most people, social is about personal connections. And that's not the same as "I know the person uploading this photo." It's "What was Mike up to last night?" "What is Christie saying about Valentine's Day?" "Who's writing what?" You could argue that FriendFeed shows all of these, in a way, but it misses this unification that I'd say is necessary. You can see photos and Twitter posts and blog entries, but you don't have this interface that says "This is Facebook, this is your portal, you can do anything you want to from this site, here's everything from your friends." In some ways it's more primitive than FriendFeed, and that's the point: people don't like complex systems. On FriendFeed there's a barrier between joining and doing. Not true on Facebook.

This is going to be the problem with OurDoings, too. I hope you guys get a good userbase, because you have a neat service, but at the same time you're largely using other service's photos, or that's the impression that I get. You're even importing from other photo aggregation sites, which I find silly. Now, the problem is that for most users, if they're putting their stuff online, they'll stay there. You use Twitter if you want to post short blurbs, you use Flickr to put up your photos, and then if you want to read other blurbs or see other photos, you stay there. I mean, stories get told on Facebook all the time. Not "I remember when this was taken: such and such a thing happened," but "Man oh man was I drunk." That's the story that people care about, and that people will reminisce about.

tl;dr, exporting data might sounds snazzy but most people just don't care enough.