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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.

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

Data portability has become a huge meme in the internet universe in the last six months. I am very supportive of the ideas behind data portability, but I am not sure that actual "portability" is really what I most want as a user.

Portability typically implies import/export. I can move my data from here to there. Certainly there is value to this, but it seems to me what I really want is a unified "data location agnostic" view of my data. For example, I'd love to be able to do a search in my data universe and find everything with the words "waterfront project" across all my data silos like Facebook, Google Apps, etc.