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It is a frustrating fact of modern internet life. Users of websites such as Facebook and Google spend hours building up and maintaining friend lists and e-mail address books, but when it comes time to move such social information to another online service, they frequently find it impossible to get their data back out. Instead, they must start re-entering their personal details from scratch.

That may soon change. Over the past year, growing numbers of influential voices have been calling for the creation of common standards for "data portability" — a move that would enable widespread sharing of social information between websites.

Supporters of data portability admit that it is still early days. "There are millions of people involved [but] there are only a relatively small number of social networking sites that are exporting," says Berners-Lee.

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.

Social networks are great: you can stay in touch with friends all across the world and find new ones based on your interests. But often, social networks serve a single purpose or interest. For instance photos, videos or classmates from school and university. This is not a problem by itself, but when you want to keep track of all your contacts in all these social networks, this is a lot of work for you to update your contacts list in all the social networks you are in. And you also might need to get a member of a social network, although you're not interesed in the subject, but only want to track your friends activities. NoseRub only defines the social network and some basic content types like media, links, micropublishing and text. You can now add all your contacts to a NoseRub network and aggregate several social networks into just one. And you always have full control of your data, as you can install NoseRub on your own server and have it connect to other servers out there.

The business risks for Web 3.0 are fundamentally changing with increased public scrutiny of data privacy, portability, expanded Web Services, data sharing, cloud computing, etc. New privacy laws, new technological capabilities, and new user demands have created a situation where the question most frequently cited by students of Web 3.0 implementations have asked: we understand how beneficial it is to link data and derive new improved services, knowledge about our users/customers but what about privacy, regulation from the consumer perspective?

Key questions are discussed: who owns user data? How should users be able to reuse it? Why should companies consider allowing their users' personal data to be easily transportable? The answer here is: because in the end it will bring our users/customers closer, a finding many major enterprises have realized: Nokia, etc.

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.

A lot of you emailed me asking where to find more videos, so I'm delivering the goods. I've expanded the previous list from a paltry 17 to a remarkable 302, and I've included podcasts this time! There were so many videos I had to break them up into different categories for easier skimming. There are no duplicates, however I did place some videos into more than one category when I felt it was appropriate. This list is monstrous, enjoy.

Would a service like Matchmine fall prey to Strands’ do-it-yourself approach to providing specific ways in which individuals can use their own data portability information? Not likely. Data portability, even with the help of Strands, will still take some time to permeate online social media. And services like Matchmine will continue to evolve, and will likely find peripheral ways in which to further monetize the underlying social behavior that goes into the very use cases towards which data portability will be applied.