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The World Wide Web Foundation seeks to advance One Web that is free and open, to expand the Web's capability and robustness, and to extend the Web's benefits to all people on the planet. The Web Foundation brings together business leaders, technology innovators, academia, government, NGOs, and experts in many fields to tackle challenges that, like the Web, are global in scale.

When Facebook joined the DataPortability.org Workgroup a few weeks ago, the press described the move both as a “bombshell” as well as “brilliant PR”. In order to understand what Facebook’s decision to join actually means a little bit better, I spoke with Chris Saad, Co-Founder and Chairperson of DataPortability.org.

IF: What does it mean for companies like Facebook to “join” DataPortability.org? CS: It means they agree to engage in the conversation and work towards a blueprint for maximum interoperability between applications.

IF: Has Facebook promised to implement any particular functionality by any particular time? CS: Not yet - but once the blueprint is done we can then start asking vendors to implement things. Many other vendors have already moved quickly - in the last few weeks and months lots of vendors have been implementing OpenID, etc - these things are not unrelated.

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.

You are at the center of the future internet, so it makes sense to begin by writing about Identity. It also makes sense because many of the participants in the modern identity movement are all connected through a single paper, which actually outlined a much more expansive vision than just Identity.

Chris Saad, cofounder and chair of the nonprofit ­DataPortability Project, notes that many current methods of transferring data expose users to huge security risks. For example, it's a common practice for social sites to ask users to submit the usernames and passwords for their Web-based e-mail accounts when they first sign up; an automated service can then search the network for people listed in their address books. "The door is open right now for any application that scrapes your Gmail address book to go ahead and scrape your shopping cart as well, or scrape your searches, or keep your username and password and pretend to be you," says Saad. "It's a nightmare of security, and it's something we need to solve sooner rather than later."

Social networks are becoming more open, more interconnected, and more distributed. Many of us in the web creation world are embracing and promoting web standards - both client-side and server-side. Microformats, standard apis, and open-source software are key building blocks of these technologies. This model can be described as having three sides/legs/arms/spokes - pick your connection: Information, Identity, and Interaction. DiSo (dee • zoh) is an umbrella project for a group of open source implementations of these distributed social networking concepts. or as Chris puts it: "to build a social network with its skin inside out". Our first target is Wordpress, bootstrapping on existing work and building out from there.

Historically, online media tend to start this way. The early services, such as CompuServe, Prodigy or AOL, began as “walled gardens” before they opened up to become websites. The early e-mail services could send messages only within their own walls (rather as Facebook's messaging does today). Instant-messaging, too, started closed, but is gradually opening up. In social networking, this evolution is just beginning. Parts of the industry are collaborating in a “data portability workgroup” to let people move their friend lists and other information around the web. Others are pushing OpenID, a plan to create a single, federated sign-on system that people can use across many sites.

Zuckerberg argues that Facebook provides something the larger web doesn’t — an undo button — which he feels is more important than data portability.

The example he offers is the Facebook news feed. As it stands if you publish something to your news feed and then decide that you want to limit who can see it by changing the privacy settings, that information is removed from your friend’s updates (assuming they no longer have the privileges necessary to access it). However, were the Facebook news feed offered as an RSS feed available outside Facebook (as we’ve often argued it should be), it would, because of the nature of RSS, no longer be retractable. Even if you changed the privacy settings and removed it from the feed, many RSS readers would already have cached or otherwise stored the post you’d like to retract.

A few weeks ago, we began talking about the new Yahoo! Search open platform. Today, we're releasing more details about two important components of the initiative -- the developer platform as well as our support of a number of semantic web standards.

By supporting semantic web standards, Yahoo! Search and site owners can bring a far richer and more useful search experience to consumers. For example, by marking up its profile pages with microformats, LinkedIn can allow Yahoo! Search and others to understand the semantic content and the relationships of the many components of its site. With a richer understanding of LinkedIn's structured data included in our index, we will be able to present users with more compelling and useful search results for their site. The benefit to LinkedIn is, of course, increased traffic quality and quantity from sites like Yahoo! Search that utilize its structured data.

In the coming weeks, we'll be releasing more detailed specifications that will describe our support of semantic web standards. Initially, we plan to support a number of microformats, including hCard, hCalendar, hReview, hAtom, and XFN. Yahoo! Search will work with the web community to evolve the vocabulary framework for embedding structured data. For starters, we plan to support vocabulary components from Dublin Core, Creative Commons, FOAF, GeoRSS, MediaRSS, and others based on feedback. And, we will support RDFa and eRDF markup to embed these into existing HTML pages. Finally, we are announcing support for the OpenSearch specification, with extensions for structured queries to deep web data sources.

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.

This paper sets out to describe a version of infrastructure or foundation for VRM (Vendor Relationship Management) based on an alternative view on sharing information online between individuals and of online identity. It sets out to explain the strategy and tactics for design, development and adoption of tools - the Mine! and FeedMe (see glossary) - and creation of an infrastructure for other solutions - VRM (relationships with individuals and vendors, transactions), self-defined identity, authentication, data portability and hopefully many more. The aim is to equip individuals with tools to take charge of their data (content, relationships, transactions, knowledge), arrange (analyse, manipulate, combine, mash-up) them according to their needs and preferences and share them on their own terms whilst connected and networked on the web.

I always say that you have to manage you online indentity and that you have to put effort in gaining online authority. This because the online world is getting more and more integrated with the real world and as a person you have to have an online authority to become popular in networks. But there are so many social networks and it takes so much time. Well possible dataportability may help to manage all your profiles online! Just watch the video.

Who really owns your address book? Many Internet companies - like Google (GOOG, Fortune 500) and Yahoo (YHOO, Fortune 500) - say unequivocally that you do. If you sign up for free e-mail accounts on their services, you're free to take your friends with you and export your contact lists to any service that you like.

But Microsoft (MSFT, Fortune 500), while publicly embracing the idea of openness, has been saying something different behind the scenes. Since last summer, lawyers representing the company have been sending cease-and-desist letters to startups that offer new users the ability to import their Microsoft Hotmail contacts. In a move that Valley guys are deriding as ham-handed, Microsoft is offering a quid pro quo: Third-party sites can access Hotmail contacts if they make Microsoft's instant-messaging client available to their users - for 25 cents per user per year. Then the company says it will waive the fee if the sites make Messenger the exclusive in-network messaging client. Such a deal.

There is a better way, of course - though it remains to be seen whether it will work. A group of companies, aligned under the banner of the DataPortability Workgroup, is trying to craft standards that would make it easy for the data we collect online to move as freely and securely from one website to another as we do. As long as two sites abide by the DataPortability rules, they can effortlessly send anything back and forth between them - data, photos, address books. "It's safe, secure, painless," says Chris Saad, the Aussie who co-founded and chairs the DPW. Hundreds of individuals and several leading companies - including Yahoo, Facebook, Google, and even Microsoft - have signed on to the workgroup, and Saad says he's optimistic that we'll see a system in place later this year.

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.

Anyone who has been involved in Open Source software development knows that you have to have a steering group, and there has to be some hierarchy. You can't get a ship moving in any direction with 50 oars in the water each rowing in their own direction. I understand that in order to have buy-in from so many different groups, no one wants to alienate anyone, but the reference made at the meeting (and I'm sorry I forgot who made it) to OpenID was a valid one. They developed the technology, then took it out to various companies and asked for buy-in. In order to "strike while the iron is hot," the luxury of having 100 people all defining things differently and addressing different concerns before there is even a rudimentary roadmap makes the scope of the project much larger than it has to be, and slows down progress.

The world has changed. At least the marketing world. The era of mass marketing and advertisment as we knew it for many years has passed. Of course TV is not dead but it’s more and more superceded by the internet with all it’s channels for niche entertainment and self expression. Banner blindness and shrinking advertisement effectiveness have added their part. And so companies look out for other ways to reach potential and existing customers.

Add to that the success of the DataPortability Working Group which set policies and technical guidelines in how to create a World Wide Web in which data is more freely flowing around than ever before bringing us closer and closer to seamless networking experience and a semantic web.

This of course is only a glimpse of what might be necessary tomorrow. And the question is of course how far this tomorrow is away. Several things are of course available already or being worked on. The Google Social Graph API is there, blogging and commenting in Plone is worked on, Multimedia support is available, OpenID is as well (but maybe could be enhanced).Creating a social networking layer using e.g. plone.relations and membrane is not too complicated to implement and marking things up with microformats is also no magic.

However, the overall value of these companies is still largely based on growth potential, which now seems shaky. Microsoft's investment in Facebook valued the company at a massive $15 billion. But in November, Twitter refused to be bought by Facebook for a reported $500 million of its stocks plus some cash.

Chris Alden, chairman and CEO of Six Apart, says that there simply isn't enough capital in the current market to sustain so many social-networking companies. "You'll see more consolidation in the next year or two," he predicts.

In October, the third most popular social-networking site, Hi5, announced that it would cut between 10 and 15 percent of its staff. And in November, the business-focused networking sites LinkedIn and Jive said that they would slash their workforces by 10 and 40 percent, respectively.

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 ).