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It was kind of heartening today - after reading yet another press release about some BigCo joining the DataPortability effort - to stumble upon this roadmap timeline of activities leading to a DataPortabilioty enabled web.  Kind of heartening in a cute naive way.

So lets please lighten it up on the press releases and claims of support - when its just not clear what the hell these companies are supporting or what they’re doing - at all.

It is a frustrating fact of modern internet life. Users of websites such as Facebook and Google spend hours building up and maintaining friend lists and e-mail address books, but when it comes time to move such social information to another online service, they frequently find it impossible to get their data back out. Instead, they must start re-entering their personal details from scratch.

That may soon change. Over the past year, growing numbers of influential voices have been calling for the creation of common standards for "data portability" — a move that would enable widespread sharing of social information between websites.

Supporters of data portability admit that it is still early days. "There are millions of people involved [but] there are only a relatively small number of social networking sites that are exporting," says Berners-Lee.

With the announcement of Microsoft joining the DataPortability workgroup, the attention is on the blossom workgroup more than it has ever been before. Naturally with all the added attention (as if Facebook and Google joining wasn’t bad enough) there is a fresh new round of people questioning the validity of DP and its associated stack.

Let me make this perfectly clear: Dataportability does not give any more or less users access to your personal information than before. Now keep that single point in mind while I give a simple example.

The company says the API will allow access to data for 100,000 movie and TV episode titles on DVD as well as Netflix account access on a user's behalf.

The API includes access to data via REST API, a Javascript API, and ATOM feeds. No JSON, which we suspect will disappoint some developers.

User authentication will occur using OAuth, the open standard we and others have been cheering for and the protocol now used for all the Google Data APIs.

As promised a few months ago, the OpenSocial Foundation is up and running. This organization seeks to ensure that OpenSocial will remain implementable by all, at no cost, in perpetuity. This Foundation will also help nurture the real power behind OpenSocial: the community of developers, containers, and everyone contributing to the specification. The curious among you are welcome to peruse the OpenSocial Foundation FAQ. In addition to the individuals listed below, the complete Board of Directors will include two additional representatives from the community at large that will be nominated and elected by that very same community in the coming weeks.

Even if you are Google, and you know every search your users do, every document they write, every chat they have - you still don’t know their facebook social graph. You don’t know their tweet stream. You don’t know the books they bought on Amazon.

Data Portability and Cloud Ownership Posted July 21st, 2008 by Ross Fadner turn_ad_publisher = 2919766;turn_ad_publisher_ad_code = 2919800;turn_ad_layout = "300x250";turn_ad_publisher_channel = 2919778;turn_ad_manual_id = 24759350;<img height="1" width="1" border="0" src="http://ad.turn.com/r/error?errMsg=noiframe&adUrl=http%3A%2F%2Fad.turn.com%2Fserver%2Fads.htm%3F%26pub%3D2919766%26code%3D2919800%26cch%3D2919778%26l%3D300x250%26tmz%3D4%26area%3D1%26rnd%3D0.19900853499693383%26lmd%3D1216835834%26aid%3D24759350%26url%3Dhttp%253A%252F%252Fwww.mediapost.com%252Fblogs%252Fraw%252F%253Fp%253D671%26ref%3Dhttp%253A%252F%252Fwww.mediapost.com%252Fblogs%252Fraw%252F%253Fcat%253D16"/> In describing the state of the data portability movement, Alex Blum, CEO of KickApps, said, “we now have a situation where major Web players are vying to be the cloud—to provide the underlying technology for social graph data.” Blum duly noted that the idea scares both publishers and audiences, but Parity CEO Paul Trevithick, for one, doesn’t seem to think the Big Brother pretensions of the likes of Google are a foregone conclusion. “The point is architectural,” he said. “Facebook would say it should be us (that should be the gatekeeper of users’ data), but data goes in and doesn’t come out.” Instead, he said that, “people, themselves, as sovereign entities, should have the control.” This is the idea behind data portability: that users control their own data, and that that data is portable; i.e. it exists in many places without belonging to any of those places. As such, Trevithick said data portability would help bring about an Internet of the future where you don’t have to repeat yourself, because your data would exist in cloud that’s accessible whenever and wherever you go online.

Up until today only a few technologies supported certain standards, the Operator extension for Firefox supports microformats, as will Firefox 3 when it is released, but none of these are big enough or important enough for the mainstream. Adding semantics to a website is a lot of hard work if no-one is around to use it.

This is why Yahoo!’s announcement is so big. Now there are machines reading that data and using it and enriching the web with it, do you, as a developer or site owner, want to miss out on that? Yahoo!’s search is to use microformats initially, to improve their understanding of the data to return more relevant results (and, from the looks of their example with LinkedIn add more detail to their search results). So, will other search engines, I’m looking at Google and Microsoft here, want to miss out on the wealth of data that they aren’t collecting and Yahoo! is?

What could be better, a reason to include semantic technologies in your site, better search results, new, intelligent services? I can only say thank you to Yahoo! for supporting this and giving it the much needed boost.

This paper sets out to describe a version of infrastructure or foundation for VRM (Vendor Relationship Management) based on an alternative view on sharing information online between individuals and of online identity. It sets out to explain the strategy and tactics for design, development and adoption of tools - the Mine! and FeedMe (see glossary) - and creation of an infrastructure for other solutions - VRM (relationships with individuals and vendors, transactions), self-defined identity, authentication, data portability and hopefully many more. The aim is to equip individuals with tools to take charge of their data (content, relationships, transactions, knowledge), arrange (analyse, manipulate, combine, mash-up) them according to their needs and preferences and share them on their own terms whilst connected and networked on the web.

Data portability has become a huge meme in the internet universe in the last six months. I am very supportive of the ideas behind data portability, but I am not sure that actual "portability" is really what I most want as a user.

Portability typically implies import/export. I can move my data from here to there. Certainly there is value to this, but it seems to me what I really want is a unified "data location agnostic" view of my data. For example, I'd love to be able to do a search in my data universe and find everything with the words "waterfront project" across all my data silos like Facebook, Google Apps, etc.

WordPress got into the social networking game by absorbing BuddyPress this month. BuddyPress is a WordPress plug in set that creates a social network out of a multiple user WordPress installation (WordPress MU). Adding BuddyPress to the WordPress family is a smart move on the part of WordPress to stay fresh and relevant.

In the meantime, people who have other, more valuable projects that have been ignored and fallen by the wayside in the great quest for something only the top ten percent of computer users want. One of the most vocal advocates for Data Portability is Chris Saad, the guy who brought us Particls - a great program. Or, it could be great, if his attention wasn't elsewhere, Twittering and blogging endlessly about Data Portability.

The DataPortability workgroup’s strongest voice, Chris Saad, noted among the DataPortability Design Principles that the mission ought to be less “fight the man” and more practical and useful goals. It will be interesting to see if the group’s finalized vision is limited to the import/export use cases, because these surely have the least potential. Otherwise, portability may not really matter to an average user, but the benefits to the user experience surely do, and I think selling DataPortability means selling the huge benefits of an efficient, distributed Web experience.

Forward-thinkers are creating innovative interfaces to your distributed data, and products are going to evolve quickly. Figuring out what portability means, what the best technologies are, and how this all looks from the user’s perspective are all pieces of a large puzzle that will strongly affect the future of the Web.

This morning the OpenID Foundation announced that Google, IBM, Microsoft, VeriSign, and Yahoo! have joined the board. The OpenID Foundation was formed in early 2006 by seven community members with the goal of helping promote, protect and enabling the OpenID technologies and community. Today’s announcement marks a milestone in the maturity and impact that the OpenID community has had. While the OpenID Foundation serves a stewardship role around the community’s intellectual property, the Foundation’s board itself does not make any decisions about the specifications the community is collaboratively building.

Despite the valid concerns that some have with Google’s Social Graph API, I thought I would talk about the technical possibilities. My social graph may be of particular interest becuase I had used my Wordpress blog’s XFN feature to mark up the blogs I read as “muse” and my profile on at least 10 social networks as “me.” Using the Google’s Social Graph API demo you can see my extensive list of FOAF and XFN URLs. There is also a machine readable format that could be fed into a new social network to find friends on that network. (click for a larger version)

The world has changed. At least the marketing world. The era of mass marketing and advertisment as we knew it for many years has passed. Of course TV is not dead but it’s more and more superceded by the internet with all it’s channels for niche entertainment and self expression. Banner blindness and shrinking advertisement effectiveness have added their part. And so companies look out for other ways to reach potential and existing customers.

Add to that the success of the DataPortability Working Group which set policies and technical guidelines in how to create a World Wide Web in which data is more freely flowing around than ever before bringing us closer and closer to seamless networking experience and a semantic web.

This of course is only a glimpse of what might be necessary tomorrow. And the question is of course how far this tomorrow is away. Several things are of course available already or being worked on. The Google Social Graph API is there, blogging and commenting in Plone is worked on, Multimedia support is available, OpenID is as well (but maybe could be enhanced).Creating a social networking layer using e.g. plone.relations and membrane is not too complicated to implement and marking things up with microformats is also no magic.

The news is sure to be welcomed by Facebook's 120 million users and its potential partners, but it presents a new challenge to proponents of the so-called "open stack" for ID management -- OpenID, OAuth and the related technologies that allow users to share data across multiple websites.

It's also good for everyone's business. By being able to use a Facebook ID to log in to Digg, the user's barrier of entry is lowered significantly and Digg gets more traffic

But where Facebook Connect is heading towards mass adoption on mainstream sites like Digg, OpenID is currently bogged down by several issues, the largest of which is poor usability.

Search engine titan Google has joined Continua, the Intel-led international coalition working to develop standards to enable interoperable e-health products and services for the personal health market.