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It was kind of heartening today - after reading yet another press release about some BigCo joining the DataPortability effort - to stumble upon this roadmap timeline of activities leading to a DataPortabilioty enabled web.  Kind of heartening in a cute naive way.

So lets please lighten it up on the press releases and claims of support - when its just not clear what the hell these companies are supporting or what they’re doing - at all.

Digg has joined the DataPortability Project, a group of websites cooperating to help you securely use your data however you want. Why? Because you own your data. It’s that simple. From the start, Digg has supported the idea that you own your own data.

Digg already supports many of the open standards that let you use your data on sites other than Digg, including RSS, OPML, and hCard. We use RDF to embed the Creative Commons public domain dedication into each page. Just this week, we added MicroID, a Microformat that lets you prove to other services that you own your Digg user profile. We’ll be adding more open standards, such as OpenID, APML, OAuth, and XFN, in the coming months.

It is a frustrating fact of modern internet life. Users of websites such as Facebook and Google spend hours building up and maintaining friend lists and e-mail address books, but when it comes time to move such social information to another online service, they frequently find it impossible to get their data back out. Instead, they must start re-entering their personal details from scratch.

That may soon change. Over the past year, growing numbers of influential voices have been calling for the creation of common standards for "data portability" — a move that would enable widespread sharing of social information between websites.

Supporters of data portability admit that it is still early days. "There are millions of people involved [but] there are only a relatively small number of social networking sites that are exporting," says Berners-Lee.

It had to happen sooner or later. We’ve had Technorati. We’ve had TechMeme. Now we have Tweetmeme, which will track what’s hot on micro-blogging platform Twitter. The business of tracking the online conversation just a got shot in the arm with the tech equivalent of crack cocaine.

The iPhone platform elegantly solves the design problem of small screens by greatly intensifying the information resolution of each displayed page. Small screens, as on traditional cell phones, show very little information per screen, which in turn leads to deep hierarchies of stacked-up thin information--too often leaving users with "Where am I?" puzzles. Better to have users looking over material adjacent in space rather than stacked in time.

The Echo Nest is a music technology company founded by two MIT Media Lab PhDs. The Echo Nest’s proprietary music analyzer API automatically analyzes audio (e.g., aif, wav, mp3, m4a), and generates an XML file describing the musical and structural content of the music. Computation takes about 1/50th of the duration of the track and the text output is about 1/20th of the size of its corresponding mp3.

Unlike other automatic methods of acoustic feature extraction, which progress strictly on raw audio signal, our technology was inspired by how people perceive music.  As a result, developers are able to automatically extract and use a wide array of time-based musical attributes for any song, including: timbre, pitch, rhythm, loudness, onsets, beats, tempo, sections, time signature, key, etc.

Whenever Microsoft Corp. eschews an open standard (think the OpenDocument Format, aka ODF), it gets pilloried. Whenever it embraces one, as it will soon do with DataPortability.org, fears rise that Redmond will twist it to its own advantage, (think Java) or, failing that, sabotage it. (ActiveX) So is the nascent DataPortability.org group at such risk from Redmond? Not according to a source inside the group. "The DataPortability group is made up of many voices - individuals who are passionate about solving the problem," the source said. "Microsoft's voice is a welcome addition but it is not the only voice in the conversation and it does not have any special consideration."

First and foremost, in the development of DP-related business models I’m seeking win-win solutions for consumers and businesses. As DP goes mainstream there will be proponents and opponents of a slew of different, important, and highly controversial aspects of DP. At the front of the line and at the top of my mind are privacy concerns. I actually think we have a chance to change privacy for the better, gain the (nearly) complete trust of consumers, and at the same time, provide businesses with better opportunities to engage in opt-in, targeted, 1-to-1 marketing. This is the holy-grail of DP IMO and the future of advertising.

This post represents a rough sketch-up of the future of DP and DP business models. It’s not quite the “sharing data between facebook and Myspace” that seems to be all the rage today. But I believe this is a realistic direction in which to head, and I think it makes a lot of sense to develop models that maintain customer privacy while sharing data in every aspect of their lives, not just on and over the Web. Furthermore, these models will help businesses employ next generation advertising that allow them to serve customers to the highest potential of the business.

“Today Microsoft is announcing that it has joined DataPortability.org, a group committed to advancing the conversation about the portability, security and privacy of individuals’ information online.  There are important security and privacy issues to solve as the internet evolves, and we are committed to being an integral part of the industry conversation on behalf of our users.

With the announcement of Microsoft joining the DataPortability workgroup, the attention is on the blossom workgroup more than it has ever been before. Naturally with all the added attention (as if Facebook and Google joining wasn’t bad enough) there is a fresh new round of people questioning the validity of DP and its associated stack.

Let me make this perfectly clear: Dataportability does not give any more or less users access to your personal information than before. Now keep that single point in mind while I give a simple example.

In a nutshell, OSocial lets you see your social data in an open, portable way and we are working on secure methods to allow friending between social networks ; and this without any new registration. OSocial can be seen as Meta Social Network - a way of joining together existing social networks by connecting profiles from different sites.

The purpose of Identity Commons is to support, facilitate, and promote the creation of an open identity layer for the Internet -- one that maximizes control, convenience, and privacy for the individual while encouraging the development of healthy, interoperable communities.

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.