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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.

What is needed though is a discussion about this and what the best practices in these cases should be. One option would be the opt-in for such XFN-markup but of course those links would still be available although not that easily extractable. Making it more private would probably harm the site’s usefulness. Removing them might also harm social services such as dopplr which make good use of them to find your contacts on dopplr.

So it’s many questions to be answered and I wonder what a good process might be to answer them. Surely there is the  around but of course they cannot just publish guidelines and the problem is solved. A broader discussion is needed and for a start maybe an exact description of the problem and coming from these some proposals to solve it.

Despite the valid concerns that some have with Google’s Social Graph API, I thought I would talk about the technical possibilities. My social graph may be of particular interest becuase I had used my Wordpress blog’s XFN feature to mark up the blogs I read as “muse” and my profile on at least 10 social networks as “me.” Using the Google’s Social Graph API demo you can see my extensive list of FOAF and XFN URLs. There is also a machine readable format that could be fed into a new social network to find friends on that network. (click for a larger version)

For website owners it only makes sense to support any kind of ” [Facebook/ Google/ Open] Connect” solution, if the majority of their user-base also maintains their social graph at one of those “Social Graph/Identity” providers. Speaking for Germany: that is neither for Facebooks Connect nor Googles Friend Connect (also with the Plaxo combo) the case yet!

We build a solution upon the OpenStack, because than it will work with much more websites, who support the OpenStack as well as a consumer

If you look at the rest of the world - outside of “Facebook-Land” - you also realize and understand much better, why it is so important to find an holistic solution approach - build on open standards - to solve the issue FB Connect addresses: we live in a very diversified world and if everybody comes up with a proprietary solution, it will be just a big mess in the end.

The first very simple implementations for the foaf+ssl protocol are now out: the first step in adding simple distributed security to the global open distributed decentralized social network that is emerging.

In this article we are going to be rather more practical, and less theoretical, but still too technical for the likes of many. I could spend a lot of time building a nice user interface to help make this blog a point and click experience. But we are not looking for point and click users now, but people who feel at home looking at some code, working with abstract security concepts, who can be critical and find solutions to problems too, and are willing to learn some new things. So I have simplified things as much as needs be for people who fall into that category (and made it easy enough for technical managers to follow too, I hope ).