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Basically what people are saying is that it’s a bad idea to give sites your usernames/passwords when you sign up. This creates a bad anti-pattern and sets a horrible precedent for users who simply give their email user/pass to hundreds of different startups with dismal security standards making it very easy for hackers to get to your sensitive data. It’s called the “password anti-pattern”.

In my mind Flickr provides probably the best page-flow pattern. So I’m saying the PROVIDERS are making this anti-pattern possible. Facebook must make it VERY easy to export users, so must Gmail and so must Yahoo etc. This must be standardized so that containers (using Open Social terminology) can provide that data using some kind of token system, and it must also happen in a process that doesn’t ask for you user/pass. I believe that because it’s not possible, networks are leaving developers with no other option but to do screen scraping.

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.

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.

Existing participatory systems are designed to separately invite online user contributions in one capacity, and to aggregate collective value in another, but few environments attempt to holistically address the production of useful outcomes by moving participation towards meaningful and intelligent results. This determined focus on how best to design participatory environments to solve problems is particularly relevant given the world’s abundance of complex and urgent problems to be addressed. Methods for solving them collectively online have only begun to be explored.

Who really owns your address book? Many Internet companies - like Google (GOOG, Fortune 500) and Yahoo (YHOO, Fortune 500) - say unequivocally that you do. If you sign up for free e-mail accounts on their services, you're free to take your friends with you and export your contact lists to any service that you like.

But Microsoft (MSFT, Fortune 500), while publicly embracing the idea of openness, has been saying something different behind the scenes. Since last summer, lawyers representing the company have been sending cease-and-desist letters to startups that offer new users the ability to import their Microsoft Hotmail contacts. In a move that Valley guys are deriding as ham-handed, Microsoft is offering a quid pro quo: Third-party sites can access Hotmail contacts if they make Microsoft's instant-messaging client available to their users - for 25 cents per user per year. Then the company says it will waive the fee if the sites make Messenger the exclusive in-network messaging client. Such a deal.

There is a better way, of course - though it remains to be seen whether it will work. A group of companies, aligned under the banner of the DataPortability Workgroup, is trying to craft standards that would make it easy for the data we collect online to move as freely and securely from one website to another as we do. As long as two sites abide by the DataPortability rules, they can effortlessly send anything back and forth between them - data, photos, address books. "It's safe, secure, painless," says Chris Saad, the Aussie who co-founded and chairs the DPW. Hundreds of individuals and several leading companies - including Yahoo, Facebook, Google, and even Microsoft - have signed on to the workgroup, and Saad says he's optimistic that we'll see a system in place later this year.

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.

Pilot Systems and Google plan to host the second Paris Bobun Sprint, which would take place at the Google Paris HQ, in 2009.