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Users can now access their matchmine MatchKey, a colorful sphere that represents a person's interests, with the single-sign-on OpenID, import user preference information from Web sites, and export their MatchKey user preference information. Users can share their MatchKey with any Web site in matchmine's "media discovery network." Each time someone uses their MatchKey, it "learns" preferences and retrieves information that matches preferences.

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: Has Facebook promised to implement any particular functionality by any particular time? CS: Not yet - but once the blueprint is done we can then start asking vendors to implement things. Many other vendors have already moved quickly - in the last few weeks and months lots of vendors have been implementing OpenID, etc - these things are not unrelated.

Even if you are Google, and you know every search your users do, every document they write, every chat they have - you still don’t know their facebook social graph. You don’t know their tweet stream. You don’t know the books they bought on Amazon.

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.  

PR-OWL is an open research work aimed to extend the OWLGo to the OWL Features Webpage (external website). ontology Web language so it can represent probabilistic ontologies. In other words, it is a probabilistic extension to OWL that provides a framework for authoring probabilistic ontologies and is based on the Bayesian first-order logic called Multi-Entity Bayesian Networks (MEBN).

Data Portability and Cloud Ownership Posted July 21st, 2008 by Ross Fadner turn_ad_publisher = 2919766;turn_ad_publisher_ad_code = 2919800;turn_ad_layout = "300x250";turn_ad_publisher_channel = 2919778;turn_ad_manual_id = 24759350;<img height="1" width="1" border="0" src="http://ad.turn.com/r/error?errMsg=noiframe&adUrl=http%3A%2F%2Fad.turn.com%2Fserver%2Fads.htm%3F%26pub%3D2919766%26code%3D2919800%26cch%3D2919778%26l%3D300x250%26tmz%3D4%26area%3D1%26rnd%3D0.19900853499693383%26lmd%3D1216835834%26aid%3D24759350%26url%3Dhttp%253A%252F%252Fwww.mediapost.com%252Fblogs%252Fraw%252F%253Fp%253D671%26ref%3Dhttp%253A%252F%252Fwww.mediapost.com%252Fblogs%252Fraw%252F%253Fcat%253D16"/> In describing the state of the data portability movement, Alex Blum, CEO of KickApps, said, “we now have a situation where major Web players are vying to be the cloud—to provide the underlying technology for social graph data.” Blum duly noted that the idea scares both publishers and audiences, but Parity CEO Paul Trevithick, for one, doesn’t seem to think the Big Brother pretensions of the likes of Google are a foregone conclusion. “The point is architectural,” he said. “Facebook would say it should be us (that should be the gatekeeper of users’ data), but data goes in and doesn’t come out.” Instead, he said that, “people, themselves, as sovereign entities, should have the control.” This is the idea behind data portability: that users control their own data, and that that data is portable; i.e. it exists in many places without belonging to any of those places. As such, Trevithick said data portability would help bring about an Internet of the future where you don’t have to repeat yourself, because your data would exist in cloud that’s accessible whenever and wherever you go online.

Liberty ID-WSF People Service Specification

Defines a secure, privacy-respecting access service by one user to another's identity information.

Social networks are becoming more open, more interconnected, and more distributed. Many of us in the web creation world are embracing and promoting web standards - both client-side and server-side. Microformats, standard apis, and open-source software are key building blocks of these technologies. This model can be described as having three sides/legs/arms/spokes - pick your connection: Information, Identity, and Interaction. DiSo (dee • zoh) is an umbrella project for a group of open source implementations of these distributed social networking concepts. or as Chris puts it: "to build a social network with its skin inside out". Our first target is Wordpress, bootstrapping on existing work and building out from there.

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.

Zuckerberg argues that Facebook provides something the larger web doesn’t — an undo button — which he feels is more important than data portability.

The example he offers is the Facebook news feed. As it stands if you publish something to your news feed and then decide that you want to limit who can see it by changing the privacy settings, that information is removed from your friend’s updates (assuming they no longer have the privileges necessary to access it). However, were the Facebook news feed offered as an RSS feed available outside Facebook (as we’ve often argued it should be), it would, because of the nature of RSS, no longer be retractable. Even if you changed the privacy settings and removed it from the feed, many RSS readers would already have cached or otherwise stored the post you’d like to retract.

A few weeks ago, we began talking about the new Yahoo! Search open platform. Today, we're releasing more details about two important components of the initiative -- the developer platform as well as our support of a number of semantic web standards.

By supporting semantic web standards, Yahoo! Search and site owners can bring a far richer and more useful search experience to consumers. For example, by marking up its profile pages with microformats, LinkedIn can allow Yahoo! Search and others to understand the semantic content and the relationships of the many components of its site. With a richer understanding of LinkedIn's structured data included in our index, we will be able to present users with more compelling and useful search results for their site. The benefit to LinkedIn is, of course, increased traffic quality and quantity from sites like Yahoo! Search that utilize its structured data.

In the coming weeks, we'll be releasing more detailed specifications that will describe our support of semantic web standards. Initially, we plan to support a number of microformats, including hCard, hCalendar, hReview, hAtom, and XFN. Yahoo! Search will work with the web community to evolve the vocabulary framework for embedding structured data. For starters, we plan to support vocabulary components from Dublin Core, Creative Commons, FOAF, GeoRSS, MediaRSS, and others based on feedback. And, we will support RDFa and eRDF markup to embed these into existing HTML pages. Finally, we are announcing support for the OpenSearch specification, with extensions for structured queries to deep web data sources.

What does all this mean? It means we can expect the web to get itself organized, in a hurry. At stake is a significant amount of traffic from Yahoo search, and anyone else that may choose to build applications on top of this data.

Yahoo’s support for semantic web standards like RDF and microformats is exactly the incentive websites need to adopt them. Instead of semantic silos scattered across the Web (think Twine), Yahoo will be pulling all the semantic information together when available, as a search engine should. Until now, there were few applications that demanded properly structured data from third parties. That changes today.

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.

The scuffle today between Facebook and Google has very little to do with user privacy and everything to do with user control. A huge battle is underway between Google, MySpace and Facebook around control of user profiles and, therefore, users themselves. And their three new products, Data Availability, Facebook Connect, and Friend Connect, are all designed to further that goal.

Ultimately I hope that I can keep my identity, friend list, photographs, videos and everything else that constitutes the (de)Centralized Me at any service provider that I trust (meaning I trust them to protect that data, but never go against my wishes and try to keep it to themselves if that isn’t what I want), and just tell sites like Facebook and everyone else where to grab it.

The bigger downside of Friend Connect is that Websites using it cannot mash up the data with their own to make compelling new applications. Glazer confirmed that the data will be sent to third party sites via an iframe rather than directly through a set of APIs (as Michael speculated on Friday). However, Glazer also says that he wouldn’t be surprised if eventually Google or somebody else makes it possible for Websites to combine the Friend Connect data with their own.

MOAT Server is a application that serves tag meanings (in HTML, JSon or RDF/XML, using content negociation) for any Tag you request. The server is shipped without any data, which means that users have first to define meanings for their tags (thanks to the clients they use, that will then update the server information) to efficiently use it, using data available on the Semantic Web, especially from the Linked Data initiative.

Early adopters of the Web rolled up their sleeves to demonstrate what was possible on their own sites (even before animated gifs came along), so perhaps advocates of things like the Web of Data, opening the social graph and DataPortability should begin at home too…

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

The highlight of the call seems to be that Microsoft will be opening the same APIs used by internal developers to build on the company's "high volume products" as public APIs available for free noncommercial use and paid commercial use. That sounds like a good start. See the company's Interoperability site for more, details from the call below.