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This session will provide an overview of the basics behind Data Portability, discussing some of the principles associated with it, how the social networking vendors are addressing it, and what you should be aware of as you consider providing or utilizing some of the newest standards that enable Data Portability.

TeleBlog regular Branko Collin gave a nice explanation of how microformats could aid pickups of information from book reviews for Technorati. Josh Gay of the Free Software Foundation, whom I met Friday at a library conference in NYC, has also been a big booster of the concept. I  can see why. As described by Wikipedia, “any page created, or any content added to microformats is placed into the public domain for maximum possible reuse.”

That sounds anti-commerce. But actually microformats could help even commercial sites by, say, bringing more traffic to a book review magazine than it would receive otherwise. Theoretically Yahoo could create a page listing reviews for a certain book and automatically pick up ratings from each publication’s writeup. Such a capability, in turn, might just drive you to visit the sites and see how the reviewers justified the rating. What’s more, other sites could ride Yahoo’s coattails and reproduce the Yahoo page.

The scuffle today between Facebook and Google has very little to do with user privacy and everything to do with user control. A huge battle is underway between Google, MySpace and Facebook around control of user profiles and, therefore, users themselves. And their three new products, Data Availability, Facebook Connect, and Friend Connect, are all designed to further that goal.

Ultimately I hope that I can keep my identity, friend list, photographs, videos and everything else that constitutes the (de)Centralized Me at any service provider that I trust (meaning I trust them to protect that data, but never go against my wishes and try to keep it to themselves if that isn’t what I want), and just tell sites like Facebook and everyone else where to grab it.

it’s not so much that MySpace is losing users in droves as it is that Facebook might be gaining completely new ones

much of the split is along the demographic lines you’d expect: Facebook partners include brands targeting more tech savvy and affluent demographics: CBS, CNET, Digg, and Hulu, to name a few, while MySpace touts more mainstream partners such as AOL, Yahoo, and eBay.