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OpenLiberty.org, the global open source community working to provide developers with resources and support for building interoperable identity-enabled services for enterprises and people, today announced the webcast Leveraging the Open Source ArisID to Build Declarative Identity-Enabled Enterprise Applications taking place at 8:00am US PT (5:00PM CET) on Thursday, December 11. The public event will provide developers with an overview of the multi-protocol ArisID API, the first open source software implementing Liberty Identity Governance Framework (IGF) components.

Robert Scobles ban from Facebook early this month brought up the discussion again about ownership of user data in social networks such as MySpace, Facebook and others, as well as about data portability. Robert Scoble did violate the terms of service agreement with Facebook; so much seems to be clear. What his actual motivations were for his actions are not so clear though. You can check out his version of the story at Computerworld and also 1938 Media's Loren Feldman's takes one and two on this incident as well.

It does not matter what the actual reasons were and what exactly happened, but one thing is clear, it brought attention to an issue that everybody who uses social networking sites is just all very familiar with. I for myself consider it a pain to rebuild profiles and connections from scratch at every social media site again and again. It takes time and as most others, is time the only commodity I have always a shortage of. Then I look at my profiles at the different sites and how they developed over time to realize that they are all looking pretty much the same, I even hooked up with the same people at all those different sites again.

Hello DataPortability.org It is actually looking very promising that this initiative will result into a standard that will be adopted by many social media sites. They are not going to reinvent the wheel and start creating something from scratch, but use and "mash-up" existing standards and initiative to create something new specifically aimed to solve the data portability problem.

The Echo Nest is a music technology company founded by two MIT Media Lab PhDs. The Echo Nest’s proprietary music analyzer API automatically analyzes audio (e.g., aif, wav, mp3, m4a), and generates an XML file describing the musical and structural content of the music. Computation takes about 1/50th of the duration of the track and the text output is about 1/20th of the size of its corresponding mp3.

Unlike other automatic methods of acoustic feature extraction, which progress strictly on raw audio signal, our technology was inspired by how people perceive music.  As a result, developers are able to automatically extract and use a wide array of time-based musical attributes for any song, including: timbre, pitch, rhythm, loudness, onsets, beats, tempo, sections, time signature, key, etc.

The social web is booming, signing up new users and generating new pieces of unique content at a steady clip. A recurring theme of the social web is "data portability," the ability to change providers without leaving behind accumulated contacts and content. Most nodes of the social web agree data portability is a good thing, but the exact process of authentication, authorization, and transport of a given user and his or her data is still up in the air. In this post I will take a deeper look at the current best practices of the social Web from the point of view of its major data hubs. We will take a detailed look at the right and wrong ways to request user data from social hubs large and small, and outline some action items for developers and business people interested in data portability and interoperability done right.

Basically what people are saying is that it’s a bad idea to give sites your usernames/passwords when you sign up. This creates a bad anti-pattern and sets a horrible precedent for users who simply give their email user/pass to hundreds of different startups with dismal security standards making it very easy for hackers to get to your sensitive data. It’s called the “password anti-pattern”.

In my mind Flickr provides probably the best page-flow pattern. So I’m saying the PROVIDERS are making this anti-pattern possible. Facebook must make it VERY easy to export users, so must Gmail and so must Yahoo etc. This must be standardized so that containers (using Open Social terminology) can provide that data using some kind of token system, and it must also happen in a process that doesn’t ask for you user/pass. I believe that because it’s not possible, networks are leaving developers with no other option but to do screen scraping.

The purpose of Identity Commons is to support, facilitate, and promote the creation of an open identity layer for the Internet -- one that maximizes control, convenience, and privacy for the individual while encouraging the development of healthy, interoperable communities.

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.

MicroID is a lightweight identity layer for the web, invented by Jeremie Miller (creator of Jabber). MicroID enables anyone to claim verifiable ownership over content hosted anywhere on the web (social networking sites, discussion forums, blogs, etc.). MicroID is not an authentication or single-sign-on service, just a straightforward method for identifying content ownership that complements existing technologies such as OpenID and microformats. The technology is radically simple and enables developers to build new and unique meta services with minimal effort. It's already being used by the likes of ClaimID, Last.fm, Ma.gnolia, Wikitravel, and Yedda.

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.

The vision for Portable Contacts has been around for a long time. Sites large and small share the goal of providing users a secure way to access their address books and friends lists without having to take their credentials or scrape their data. But only in recent weeks has it begun to feel that now is the right time to rally the community and the industry to work together to make this vision real by developing an open spec for exchange of contact info that everyone can embrace.

The high profile but heretofore loosely organized Data Portability Working Group announced last night that it has elected its first group of Steering Group officers. The Working Group strives to help user data become freed for secure re-use across different websites and services. The first chair of the Steering Group will be Daniela Barbosa, who is a Business Development Manager, at Synaptica, a Dow Jones company.

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.