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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.

The YQL platform provides a single endpoint service that enables developers to query, filter and combine data across Yahoo! and beyond. YQL exposes a SQL-like SELECT syntax that that is both familiar to developers and expressive enough for getting the right data

The DataPortability initiative just released their report for the month of January. I love the open approach the group has embraced to share the issues, highlights, and progress with the community.

The Good: The work is being broken down into a bunch of action groups to help get the teams organized and break the work into manageable chunks.

The Bad: Like many similar efforts, the big vendors agree to participate and make a lot of noise about it, but they haven’t all been doing the real work necessary to make it succeed. With any luck, this open approach will convince some of the vendors that they need to participate and contribute if they want to be part of the initiative.

Social networks are great: you can stay in touch with friends all across the world and find new ones based on your interests. But often, social networks serve a single purpose or interest. For instance photos, videos or classmates from school and university. This is not a problem by itself, but when you want to keep track of all your contacts in all these social networks, this is a lot of work for you to update your contacts list in all the social networks you are in. and you also might need to get a member of a social network, although you're not interesed in the subject, but only want to track your friends activities. NoseRub only defines the social network and some basic content types like media, links, micropublishing and text. You can now add all your contacts to a NoseRub network and aggregate several social networks into just one. and you always have full control of your data, as you can install NoseRub on your own server and have it connect to other servers out there.

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.

For users to have true data portability, there needs to be some consensus on both the APIs and the formats needed to transfer / represent this portable data. It may be that a number of APIs and formats are required for different scenarios. The Semantic Web is an ideal means for representing the data to be ported from social websites, in that is well suited (using vocabularies like SIOC and FOAF) to represent how people and all kinds of objects on these sites are connected together (documents, discussions, meetups, places, interests, media files - whatever). Of course other data formats may be used, but most importantly, it would be a waste of time to come up with a bunch of new formats for representing the data that needs to be portable, because a lot of work has been done on how to best provide interoperable, reusable and linked data through efforts like the Semantic Web, AtomPub and the microformats community.