There’s an interesting comment thread on TechCrunch about data sharing among competing web sites. In one of the comments, Kevin Burton says, “just be a real man and scrape the html.” I laughed out loud. There’s a route-around for this kind of stuff, of course. Take a look at what the coComment people are doing, and imagine extrapolating their idea to everything the user posts to the web. Want to switch to a new service? Point them at the middle-man instead. It’d be a perfect application of Amazon S3. And if you go build it, please cut me in on the IPO ;-).