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It was kind of heartening today - after reading yet another press release about some BigCo joining the DataPortability effort - to stumble upon this roadmap timeline of activities leading to a DataPortabilioty enabled web.  Kind of heartening in a cute naive way.

So lets please lighten it up on the press releases and claims of support - when its just not clear what the hell these companies are supporting or what they’re doing - at all.

It had to happen sooner or later. We’ve had Technorati. We’ve had TechMeme. Now we have Tweetmeme, which will track what’s hot on micro-blogging platform Twitter. The business of tracking the online conversation just a got shot in the arm with the tech equivalent of crack cocaine.

The social web is booming, signing up new users and generating new pieces of unique content at a steady clip. A recurring theme of the social web is "data portability," the ability to change providers without leaving behind accumulated contacts and content. Most nodes of the social web agree data portability is a good thing, but the exact process of authentication, authorization, and transport of a given user and his or her data is still up in the air. In this post I will take a deeper look at the current best practices of the social Web from the point of view of its major data hubs. We will take a detailed look at the right and wrong ways to request user data from social hubs large and small, and outline some action items for developers and business people interested in data portability and interoperability done right.

Whenever Microsoft Corp. eschews an open standard (think the OpenDocument Format, aka ODF), it gets pilloried. Whenever it embraces one, as it will soon do with DataPortability.org, fears rise that Redmond will twist it to its own advantage, (think Java) or, failing that, sabotage it. (ActiveX) So is the nascent DataPortability.org group at such risk from Redmond? Not according to a source inside the group. "The DataPortability group is made up of many voices - individuals who are passionate about solving the problem," the source said. "Microsoft's voice is a welcome addition but it is not the only voice in the conversation and it does not have any special consideration."

With the announcement of Microsoft joining the DataPortability workgroup, the attention is on the blossom workgroup more than it has ever been before. Naturally with all the added attention (as if Facebook and Google joining wasn’t bad enough) there is a fresh new round of people questioning the validity of DP and its associated stack.

Let me make this perfectly clear: Dataportability does not give any more or less users access to your personal information than before. Now keep that single point in mind while I give a simple example.

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.

Tahoe is a secure, decentralized, fault-tolerant filesystem. All of the source code is available under a Free Software, Open Source licence. This filesystem is encrypted and spread over multiple peers in such a way that it remains available even when some of the peers are unavailable, malfunctioning, or malicious. The one-page summary explains the unique properties of this system.

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.

The vision for Portable Contacts has been around for a long time. Sites large and small share the goal of providing users a secure way to access their address books and friends lists without having to take their credentials or scrape their data. But only in recent weeks has it begun to feel that now is the right time to rally the community and the industry to work together to make this vision real by developing an open spec for exchange of contact info that everyone can embrace.