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I've been following the barrage of news regarding Data Portability with a mix of excitement and trepidation. I've been a proponent of OpenID, and regularly use services like PassPack to keep track of the ridiculous number of log-ins I seem to have accumulated. At the same time, I worry about what data is essentially mine, and what doesn't rightfully belong to me. I'm still not convinced that Robert Scoble owned the contact information for his 5000 "friends" on Facebook, and that is the facet of Data Portability that worries me, at least a little.

I'm finding that the more avenues I have to share my data online, the more I find myself wanting to pull what I already have out there back. I find it hard to imagine that I'm the only person who worries about the over-reaching umbrella of Google linking up to every other site who joins the Data Portability Workgroup and the sheer amount of amassed information any one entity could end up possessing about me.

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.

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.

The next trick will be building awareness and adoption. When you consider that 0% of all websites (or enterprise apps) accept i-cards or OpenID, and 0% of sites issue cards, it’s small wonder that 0% of users today even know what an identity selector is. We’ve got our work cut out for us!

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).