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This session will provide an overview of the basics behind Data Portability, discussing some of the principles associated with it, how the social networking vendors are addressing it, and what you should be aware of as you consider providing or utilizing some of the newest standards that enable Data Portability.

One. DataPortability.org is a volunteer, community project.

Two. DataPortability.org takes nothing for granted and does not adhere to any one gospel of portability.

Three. Warning — this is a PSA. Let’s stop demonizing PR and using “PR” in place of moron, lightweight or unproductive.

TeleBlog regular Branko Collin gave a nice explanation of how microformats could aid pickups of information from book reviews for Technorati. Josh Gay of the Free Software Foundation, whom I met Friday at a library conference in NYC, has also been a big booster of the concept. I  can see why. As described by Wikipedia, “any page created, or any content added to microformats is placed into the public domain for maximum possible reuse.”

That sounds anti-commerce. But actually microformats could help even commercial sites by, say, bringing more traffic to a book review magazine than it would receive otherwise. Theoretically Yahoo could create a page listing reviews for a certain book and automatically pick up ratings from each publication’s writeup. Such a capability, in turn, might just drive you to visit the sites and see how the reviewers justified the rating. What’s more, other sites could ride Yahoo’s coattails and reproduce the Yahoo page.

Search Monkey will be the first use of structured data by Yahoo, but they could potentially be used to affect other parts of the search results or ranking algorithms in the future, according to Kumar. Yahoo will provide more details at an upcoming developer conference it's planning in the coming weeks.

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.

If you are anything like me (which I hope for your sake you’re not), you’ll be constantly tripping over the names of new data portability initiatives concerned with exchanging social information. Combine any of the following words and create a new name [‘Open’, ‘Social’, ‘Contacts’, ‘Data’, ‘ID’], I checked all the domains and guess what? They’re all taken. (No shit, Sherlock) I thought it would be helpful to list these initiatives and provide a quick comparison of what they do and why they exist. This is my current understanding of the various players. Please comment and correct me where I’m wrong or have omitted important initiatives.

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.

The bigger downside of Friend Connect is that Websites using it cannot mash up the data with their own to make compelling new applications. Glazer confirmed that the data will be sent to third party sites via an iframe rather than directly through a set of APIs (as Michael speculated on Friday). However, Glazer also says that he wouldn’t be surprised if eventually Google or somebody else makes it possible for Websites to combine the Friend Connect data with their own.

MOAT Server is a application that serves tag meanings (in HTML, JSON or RDF/XML, using content negociation) for any Tag you request. The server is shipped without any data, which means that users have first to define meanings for their tags (thanks to the clients they use, that will then update the server information) to efficiently use it, using data available on the Semantic Web, especially from the Linked Data initiative.

if you're familiar with XFN think of findmeon like this: findmeon can let your 'xfn rel="me"' items be anchored to a digital signature. you can then either publish the public key, so that everyone knows for sure that those xfn relations are legit and not spoofed-- or you can not publish the key and have multiple circles/networks of 'xfn rel="me"' documents which are only brought together when someone is provided with a shared public key.

The Google Contacts Data API allows client applications to view and update Contacts content in the form of Google Data API feeds. Your client application can request a list of a user's contacts, edit or delete content in an existing contact, and query the content in an existing contact. Here are some of the things you can do with the Contacts Data API: Synchronize Google contacts with contacts on a mobile device Maintain relationships between people in social applications Give users the ability to communicate directly with their friends from external applications using phone, email, and IM

Gartner analysts at the Gartner Symposium/ITxpo in Las Vegas discussed what they believe will be the most disruptive technologies through 2012. Disruptive technologies are those that force changes in industry models, business processes, vendor types, products and services, as well as the all-important user model. Take a look at this list and tell us whether you think something has been omitted—or just plain doesn't belong. This list is ranked in order from least disruptive to most disruptive.

WordPress got into the social networking game by absorbing BuddyPress this month. BuddyPress is a WordPress plug in set that creates a social network out of a multiple user WordPress installation (WordPress MU). Adding BuddyPress to the WordPress family is a smart move on the part of WordPress to stay fresh and relevant.

In the meantime, people who have other, more valuable projects that have been ignored and fallen by the wayside in the great quest for something only the top ten percent of computer users want. One of the most vocal advocates for Data Portability is Chris Saad, the guy who brought us Particls - a great program. Or, it could be great, if his attention wasn't elsewhere, Twittering and blogging endlessly about Data Portability.

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.