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A few months ago, we announced that we were opening the social graph and invited others to join us. An effort like that encompasses many different technology projects and all kinds of different companies; in just a few months the idea of opening up social networks has received a lot of attention. Today we're excited to share an amazing new plugin for Movable Type that allows you to aggregate, control, and share your actions around the web and we're the first to bring this sort of functionality to free and open source blogging tools.

It's worth revisiting some of the successes the openness movement has accomplished in just the past few months: Google's OpenSocial released new versions of its APIs and we hosted a wildly successful hackathon to help support the creation of new widgets for the standard. OpenID 2.0 shipped and both Google and Yahoo! are now supporting OpenID, bringing hundreds of millions of new IDs to the community. The group DataPortability.org was formed and released a video reinforcing these themes around openness. And finally, we've made good on our promise to let you show off all the services you belong to, with TypePad and Vox automatically letting you list your accounts around the web on your blogs using Microformats to link to your profiles. And as of today, the same ability is available for Movable Type.

As we explained half a year ago, we're on a mission. Like we said then, blogs change the way we communicate. Just like with TrackBack, OpenID, opening the social graph, and so much else in blogging, we're hoping that we can influence everyone else to follow our lead and move blogging forward with us. Bringing your actions around the web under your control is a fundamental next step to making all of our blogs even more powerful and expressive.

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.

What does all this mean? It means we can expect the web to get itself organized, in a hurry. At stake is a significant amount of traffic from Yahoo search, and anyone else that may choose to build applications on top of this data.

Yahoo’s support for semantic web standards like RDF and microformats is exactly the incentive websites need to adopt them. Instead of semantic silos scattered across the Web (think Twine), Yahoo will be pulling all the semantic information together when available, as a search engine should. Until now, there were few applications that demanded properly structured data from third parties. That changes today.