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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.

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.

The news today is that Microsoft intends to join the DataPortability Project. So where’s the beef? Why are long-time influentials from all these large vendors joining the cause? What are we offering? What are we trying to do? What’s in it for them? What do they bring to the table?

First, I’d like to clarify that DataPortability is not mine. It is an initiative that was co-founded by many people who all believed that something was missing from the existing Identity/Data/Standards landscape. Something very small, but very important.

Today we’re announcing the launch of Ubiquity, a Mozilla Labs experiment into connecting the Web with language in an attempt to find new user interfaces that could make it possible for everyone to do common Web tasks more quickly and easily.

Up until today only a few technologies supported certain standards, the Operator extension for Firefox supports microformats, as will Firefox 3 when it is released, but none of these are big enough or important enough for the mainstream. Adding semantics to a website is a lot of hard work if no-one is around to use it.

This is why Yahoo!’s announcement is so big. Now there are machines reading that data and using it and enriching the web with it, do you, as a developer or site owner, want to miss out on that? Yahoo!’s search is to use microformats initially, to improve their understanding of the data to return more relevant results (and, from the looks of their example with LinkedIn add more detail to their search results). So, will other search engines, I’m looking at Google and Microsoft here, want to miss out on the wealth of data that they aren’t collecting and Yahoo! is?

What could be better, a reason to include semantic technologies in your site, better search results, new, intelligent services? I can only say thank you to Yahoo! for supporting this and giving it the much needed boost.

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.

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.

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.

At Mahalo we just rolled out rolled out Microformats for relevant search result pages. So what does this mean, and what are Microformats? Well, they are data classes that help machines and people identify and export information. Data such as contacts and address information is much easier to manage, search engines can also better catalog the info. Yes a little bit of the semantic web of tomorrow….today!

The next trick will be building awareness and adoption. When you consider that 0% of all websites (or enterprise apps) accept i-cards or OpenID, and 0% of sites issue cards, it’s small wonder that 0% of users today even know what an identity selector is. We’ve got our work cut out for us!

Today, organizations are spending an excessive amount of time learning about OpenID, installing and configuring Open Source libraries, customizing and integrating with existing infrastructure, and maintaining the latest features and capabilities of OpenID. With the comprehensive JanRain RPX solution, a software as a service platform, you can capture all the benefits of OpenID for your website without all the hassles.

Beginning today, Windows Live™ ID is publicly committing to support the OpenID digital identity framework with the announcement of the public availability of a Community Technology Preview (CTP) of the Windows Live ID OpenID Provider.

Note that the Windows Live ID OP supports only the OpenID 2.0 protocol.

The current Technology Preview release is for testing purposes only