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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.

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.

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: Who controls the direction of DataPortability.org? CS: DataPortability is managed like a wiki - participants step up to the plate and just get things done. Some of the most active participants join the Steering group to help set the direction.

Several Internet and broadband companies have acknowledged using targeted-advertising technology without explicitly informing customers, according to letters released yesterday by the House Energy and Commerce Committee.

"Increasingly, there are no limits technologically as to what a company can do in terms of collecting information . . . and then selling it as a commodity to other providers," said committee member Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.), who created the Privacy Caucus 12 years ago. "Our responsibility is to make sure that we create a law that, regardless of the technology, includes a set of legal guarantees that consumers have with respect to their information."

Markey said he and his colleagues plan to introduce legislation next year, a sort of online-privacy Bill of Rights, that would require that consumers must opt in to the tracking of their online behavior and the collection and sharing of their personal data.

Recently there were three vaporware announcements by Facebook, Google and MySpace each describing a way for other web sites to integrate the user profiles and friends lists from these popular social networking sites. Given that I'm a big fan of social networking sites and interoperability between them, this seemed like an interesting set of announcements. So I decided to take a look at these announcements especially given the timing of them.  

For users to have true data portability, there needs to be some consensus on both the APIs and the formats needed to transfer / represent this portable data. It may be that a number of APIs and formats are required for different scenarios. The Semantic Web is an ideal means for representing the data to be ported from social websites, in that is well suited (using vocabularies like SIOC and FOAF) to represent how people and all kinds of objects on these sites are connected together (documents, discussions, meetups, places, interests, media files - whatever). Of course other data formats may be used, but most importantly, it would be a waste of time to come up with a bunch of new formats for representing the data that needs to be portable, because a lot of work has been done on how to best provide interoperable, reusable and linked data through efforts like the Semantic Web, AtomPub and the microformats community.

All very wonderful, right? Well, maybe not - as some SEOs and webmasters say. Their main concern is that by providing such a structured format of their content - content scrapers will need very little skill in stealing their content and repurposing it in a useful manner. SEOs and webmasters don't mind Yahoo getting this data from them, but they know that leaving this easy to use and structured format open to Yahoo will also give anyone else access to their data. Same issue with XML but this is even more fine tuned data, because webmasters can detail minute details about their content

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.

Would a service like Matchmine fall prey to Strands’ do-it-yourself approach to providing specific ways in which individuals can use their own data portability information? Not likely. Data portability, even with the help of Strands, will still take some time to permeate online social media. And services like Matchmine will continue to evolve, and will likely find peripheral ways in which to further monetize the underlying social behavior that goes into the very use cases towards which data portability will be applied.

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

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.

As you might know I attended the London DataPortability Lunch last week and met cool people like Chris Saad, Julian Bond, John Breslin, Tom Morris and others. Among other things we have been discussing the maybe first use case to tackle for Data Portability which is Discovery. As you also might know there was some discussion about how to approach the DataPortability problem space and one of the ideas which came out of that was my idea of dividing it into fields and levels. Now this general discovery use case nevertheless makes much sense because it seems to be a general starting point for every field we might address. So how does it work?

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.

On Sunday, we had a significant discussion on data portability and about the activities, responsibilities and opportunities of and for the eponymous group which has recently generated much hype and buzz but little, (as far as I’ve see) clarity and/or cogent strategy for advancing its expansive charter:

So anyway, I do believe that there is an opportunity here and Chris Saad is correct that getting a number of the prominent players in this arena to come to the table on this topic is a feat; however, simply bringing them together without engaging with the gnarly problems and policies that have kept data portability from becoming a reality could bring more confusion and angst than benefit.

The frustration over the minimal barrier to “becoming a member” of the group (you simply have to sign up for a mailing list) and the focus on large vendors without advancing an agenda with teeth and clearly defined metrics for success was palpable. But so was the desire to make some progress, and if not come to complete agreement, to at least identify concerns shared by the majority of us and perhaps develop a strategy to deflate the hype to date and get the group moving in a productive direction.

Despite the valid concerns that some have with Google’s Social Graph API, I thought I would talk about the technical possibilities. My social graph may be of particular interest becuase I had used my Wordpress blog’s XFN feature to mark up the blogs I read as “muse” and my profile on at least 10 social networks as “me.” Using the Google’s Social Graph API demo you can see my extensive list of FOAF and XFN URLs. There is also a machine readable format that could be fed into a new social network to find friends on that network. (click for a larger version)

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.