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Data portability is an idea long championed, and becoming more important all the time.  As we continue to load our online lives on to various social networking sites, the concept of making it easy to get that information back off again, and re-using the information on the next big site without having to start over from scratch are compelling, reasonable, and just plain logical.  Why would you want it any other way?.

It's a good sign that DataPortability.Org is gaining traction.  It's also a good sign that Microsoft has joined.  While Microsoft certainly can't be thought of as a leader in the move to open up our data, it has been making serious strides to open up a number of its platforms, and a common vision shared by the members of DataPortability.Org could make control of our own data something closer to a reality.

MySpace has just announced that they will be launching their developer platform on February 5th. You can pre-register now by going to http://developer.myspace.com (requires login).

rom a technology perspective, Kapur says most of the specific details will be released on the 5th, but he did emphasize that the company has maintained an open relationship with widget developers, and wants them to be able to use data from MySpace in their applications, potentially including your friend’s list. With Facebook moving to allow developers to host applications on third-party sites and DataPortability continuing to gain traction, this seems like the only way to go.

Finally, Kapur told me that the MySpace Developer Program will support Google OpenSocial from day one. This may provide a much needed boost for OpenSocial, which has received criticism for offering very little in the way of tangible products since being announced.

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.

Whenever Microsoft Corp. eschews an open standard (think the OpenDocument Format, aka ODF), it gets pilloried. Whenever it embraces one, as it will soon do with DataPortability.org, fears rise that Redmond will twist it to its own advantage, (think Java) or, failing that, sabotage it. (ActiveX) So is the nascent DataPortability.org group at such risk from Redmond? Not according to a source inside the group. "The DataPortability group is made up of many voices - individuals who are passionate about solving the problem," the source said. "Microsoft's voice is a welcome addition but it is not the only voice in the conversation and it does not have any special consideration."

“Today Microsoft is announcing that it has joined DataPortability.org, a group committed to advancing the conversation about the portability, security and privacy of individuals’ information online.  There are important security and privacy issues to solve as the internet evolves, and we are committed to being an integral part of the industry conversation on behalf of our users.

The news today is that Microsoft intends to join the DataPortability Project. So where’s the beef? Why are long-time influentials from all these large vendors joining the cause? What are we offering? What are we trying to do? What’s in it for them? What do they bring to the table?

First, I’d like to clarify that DataPortability is not mine. It is an initiative that was co-founded by many people who all believed that something was missing from the existing Identity/Data/Standards landscape. Something very small, but very important.

In a nutshell, OSocial lets you see your social data in an open, portable way and we are working on secure methods to allow friending between social networks ; and this without any new registration. OSocial can be seen as Meta Social Network - a way of joining together existing social networks by connecting profiles from different sites.

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.

Today we’re announcing the launch of Ubiquity, a Mozilla Labs experiment into connecting the Web with language in an attempt to find new user interfaces that could make it possible for everyone to do common Web tasks more quickly and easily.

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.

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.

Recently there were three vaporware announcements by Facebook, Google and MySpace each describing a way for other web sites to integrate the user profiles and friends lists from these popular social networking sites. Given that I'm a big fan of social networking sites and interoperability between them, this seemed like an interesting set of announcements. So I decided to take a look at these announcements especially given the timing of them.  

PR-OWL is an open research work aimed to extend the OWLGo to the OWL Features Webpage (external website). ontology Web language so it can represent probabilistic ontologies. In other words, it is a probabilistic extension to OWL that provides a framework for authoring probabilistic ontologies and is based on the Bayesian first-order logic called Multi-Entity Bayesian Networks (MEBN).

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.

using the superior spam blocking skills of services like Yahoo! and AIM

stopped issuing new user credentials last night and now requires new users to create a Ma.gnolia account using an OpenID from somewhere else.

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.