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First and foremost, in the development of DP-related business models I’m seeking win-win solutions for consumers and businesses. As DP goes mainstream there will be proponents and opponents of a slew of different, important, and highly controversial aspects of DP. At the front of the line and at the top of my mind are privacy concerns. I actually think we have a chance to change privacy for the better, gain the (nearly) complete trust of consumers, and at the same time, provide businesses with better opportunities to engage in opt-in, targeted, 1-to-1 marketing. This is the holy-grail of DP IMO and the future of advertising.

This post represents a rough sketch-up of the future of DP and DP business models. It’s not quite the “sharing data between facebook and Myspace” that seems to be all the rage today. But I believe this is a realistic direction in which to head, and I think it makes a lot of sense to develop models that maintain customer privacy while sharing data in every aspect of their lives, not just on and over the Web. Furthermore, these models will help businesses employ next generation advertising that allow them to serve customers to the highest potential of the business.

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.

Ultimately, the problem represents an opportunity for Internet companies. "In the end, whoever moves first to be truly open will have the advantage," Saad said. J. Trent Adams, founder and chief innovator at Matchmine, another vendor pushing for data portability, concurs. A stealthy startup could develop a clever application or service built on data portability standards and force other vendors to respond. "All of a sudden, it's the right idea, and the big boys will have to react," Adams said. In other words, Internet companies who insist on locking up their users' data to protect their businesses might soon find themselves instead stuck in the mud.

Tahoe is a secure, decentralized, fault-tolerant filesystem. All of the source code is available under a Free Software, Open Source licence. This filesystem is encrypted and spread over multiple peers in such a way that it remains available even when some of the peers are unavailable, malfunctioning, or malicious. The one-page summary explains the unique properties of this system.

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.

The World Wide Web Foundation seeks to advance One Web that is free and open, to expand the Web's capability and robustness, and to extend the Web's benefits to all people on the planet. The Web Foundation brings together business leaders, technology innovators, academia, government, NGOs, and experts in many fields to tackle challenges that, like the Web, are global in scale.

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.

You are at the center of the future internet, so it makes sense to begin by writing about Identity. It also makes sense because many of the participants in the modern identity movement are all connected through a single paper, which actually outlined a much more expansive vision than just Identity.

One. DataPortability.org is a volunteer, community project.

Two. DataPortability.org takes nothing for granted and does not adhere to any one gospel of portability.

Three. Warning — this is a PSA. Let’s stop demonizing PR and using “PR” in place of moron, lightweight or unproductive.

For users to have true data portability, there needs to be some consensus on both the APIs and the formats needed to transfer / represent this portable data. It may be that a number of APIs and formats are required for different scenarios. The Semantic Web is an ideal means for representing the data to be ported from social websites, in that is well suited (using vocabularies like SIOC and FOAF) to represent how people and all kinds of objects on these sites are connected together (documents, discussions, meetups, places, interests, media files - whatever). Of course other data formats may be used, but most importantly, it would be a waste of time to come up with a bunch of new formats for representing the data that needs to be portable, because a lot of work has been done on how to best provide interoperable, reusable and linked data through efforts like the Semantic Web, AtomPub and the microformats community.

All very wonderful, right? Well, maybe not - as some SEOs and webmasters say. Their main concern is that by providing such a structured format of their content - content scrapers will need very little skill in stealing their content and repurposing it in a useful manner. SEOs and webmasters don't mind Yahoo getting this data from them, but they know that leaving this easy to use and structured format open to Yahoo will also give anyone else access to their data. Same issue with XML but this is even more fine tuned data, because webmasters can detail minute details about their content

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.

This is reason why Kingsley and a bunch of other people like to call the "Semantic Web" the "Linked Data Web".  Potayto-potato, it's all the same to me.  It’s cool, though.  It lets an application traverse the social graph to do its thing instead of being confined to its own network.  It allows an application on one network to access Person C’s data, on another network, by going from Person A to Person B to Person C, and then to their data.

The next trick will be building awareness and adoption. When you consider that 0% of all websites (or enterprise apps) accept i-cards or OpenID, and 0% of sites issue cards, it’s small wonder that 0% of users today even know what an identity selector is. We’ve got our work cut out for us!

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.

As an example, the Dataportability movement has framed the problem in terms of Data and Portability. This brings to mind exporting and importing “my” data from vendor to vendor. That’s a start toward liberating users from vendor silos. However, I think the real win is in user-centric services, where the location of the “data” is essentially irrelevant–even as it is hosted under the control of the user–and all user-authorized vendors can access the data through approved services.

Gartner analysts at the Gartner Symposium/ITxpo in Las Vegas discussed what they believe will be the most disruptive technologies through 2012. Disruptive technologies are those that force changes in industry models, business processes, vendor types, products and services, as well as the all-important user model. Take a look at this list and tell us whether you think something has been omitted—or just plain doesn't belong. This list is ranked in order from least disruptive to most disruptive.

I always say that you have to manage you online indentity and that you have to put effort in gaining online authority. This because the online world is getting more and more integrated with the real world and as a person you have to have an online authority to become popular in networks. But there are so many social networks and it takes so much time. Well possible dataportability may help to manage all your profiles online! Just watch the video.

My last column discussed the brand utility supported entertainment model in which content providers and marketers work upstream to create customized complimentary experiences. One option would be to align this model with the open standard objectives of DataPortability.org. Their mission: to gather "existing open standards into a blueprint for a social, open, remixable Web where your online identity, media, contacts and content can follow you wherever you go."

For brands and content creators, that means conversation would truly have to be initiated by the user. The user would own the data, and the brand content offering would have to be valuable enough to warrant an exchange. In essence, brand content would be bought with "data currency."

There are brand enthusiasts who participate in campaigns on an ongoing basis. Yet each time they return, these fans must register and sign-up for the full experience. If the brand were to embrace technologies such as OpenID, not only would it provide their fans access to cross-promotional properties around that campaign, it would also provide easy access to all future campaigns. And with future potential of data portability, people could take those experiences with them, introducing content to friends and hopefully igniting passionate new fans.

Anyone who has been involved in Open Source software development knows that you have to have a steering group, and there has to be some hierarchy. You can't get a ship moving in any direction with 50 oars in the water each rowing in their own direction. I understand that in order to have buy-in from so many different groups, no one wants to alienate anyone, but the reference made at the meeting (and I'm sorry I forgot who made it) to OpenID was a valid one. They developed the technology, then took it out to various companies and asked for buy-in. In order to "strike while the iron is hot," the luxury of having 100 people all defining things differently and addressing different concerns before there is even a rudimentary roadmap makes the scope of the project much larger than it has to be, and slows down progress.