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MySpace and Google demonstrated an interesting mashup of the MySpace Data Availability API, oAuth and the iGoogle gadget specification at the oAuth Summit a couple of weeks ago. The application, which pulls the core MySpace feature set into iGoogle, is not yet publicly available, although MySpace has said to expect in in August.

MySpace is essentially making key user data, including (1) Publicly available basic profile information, (2) MySpace photos, (3) MySpaceTV videos, and (4) friend networks, available to partners via their (previousy internal) RESTful API, along with user authentication via OAuth.

First things first. DataPortability is a brand… its a kind of un-organisation (a bit like BarCamps are un-conferences); a group of people and organisations who have the same philosophy, a philosophy of the portability of data. Every member of DataPortability should push for (advocate/evangelise) portability of data to web-users, developers and organisations.

The DataPortability Project will support other projects/groups working towards data portability (at the moment this explicitly includes communities involved in OpenID, OAuth, Microformats and the Semantic Web). Some members of DataPortability are also involved with legal issues and privacy which are just as important as the portability of data. The DataPortability Project is there to support people into a Web of Data.

Portability of data, or data portability is portable data. In other words, data can be copy/pasted and/or moved from one location to another. This is dependent on accessibility.

The company says the API will allow access to data for 100,000 movie and TV episode titles on DVD as well as Netflix account access on a user's behalf.

The API includes access to data via REST API, a Javascript API, and ATOM feeds. No JSON, which we suspect will disappoint some developers.

User authentication will occur using OAuth, the open standard we and others have been cheering for and the protocol now used for all the Google Data APIs.

As the web grows exponentially in scale and complexity, an issue that becomes increasingly pressing is data ownership. There has been a lot of noise lately about how Facebook Connect, Google Friend Connect, and even MySpace’s Data Availability.

The Data Portability Project is trying very, very hard to solve these serious issues. They’re seeking to unite the socio-rhetorico-legal precedent with the growing list of open technologies and specifications (OpenID, OAuth, RSS, OPML, MicroFormats, Creative Commons, to name a few) and make sure that these proprietary bits, bytes, friends, enemies, birthdays, activies, pictures, videos, lifestyles, etc. are made open to the content creators (read: YOU, not Mark Zuckerberg).

The news is sure to be welcomed by Facebook's 120 million users and its potential partners, but it presents a new challenge to proponents of the so-called "open stack" for ID management -- OpenID, OAuth and the related technologies that allow users to share data across multiple websites.

It's also good for everyone's business. By being able to use a Facebook ID to log in to Digg, the user's barrier of entry is lowered significantly and Digg gets more traffic

But where Facebook Connect is heading towards mass adoption on mainstream sites like Digg, OpenID is currently bogged down by several issues, the largest of which is poor usability.

Digg has joined the DataPortability Project, a group of websites cooperating to help you securely use your data however you want. Why? Because you own your data. It’s that simple. From the start, Digg has supported the idea that you own your own data.

Digg already supports many of the open standards that let you use your data on sites other than Digg, including RSS, OPML, and hCard. We use RDF to embed the Creative Commons public domain dedication into each page. Just this week, we added MicroID, a Microformat that lets you prove to other services that you own your Digg user profile. We’ll be adding more open standards, such as OpenID, APML, OAuth, and XFN, in the coming months.

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.

What is the relationship between the RP and the OP. Problem: we want to message “Hey, these two sites are going to be tied togethr somehow.”

keep the first screen really simple; delay deeper stuff (like extended permissions) to later flows, in context

“When ‘open’ was in the term, people had security concerns,” says Max