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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?

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.