DataPortability

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.

MySpace has just announced that they will be launching their developer platform on February 5th. You can pre-register now by going to http://developer.myspace.com (requires login).

rom a technology perspective, Kapur says most of the specific details will be released on the 5th, but he did emphasize that the company has maintained an open relationship with widget developers, and wants them to be able to use data from MySpace in their applications, potentially including your friend’s list. With Facebook moving to allow developers to host applications on third-party sites and DataPortability continuing to gain traction, this seems like the only way to go.

Finally, Kapur told me that the MySpace Developer Program will support Google OpenSocial from day one. This may provide a much needed boost for OpenSocial, which has received criticism for offering very little in the way of tangible products since being announced.

MicroID is a lightweight identity layer for the web, invented by Jeremie Miller (creator of Jabber). MicroID enables anyone to claim verifiable ownership over content hosted anywhere on the web (social networking sites, discussion forums, blogs, etc.). MicroID is not an authentication or single-sign-on service, just a straightforward method for identifying content ownership that complements existing technologies such as OpenID and microformats. The technology is radically simple and enables developers to build new and unique meta services with minimal effort. It's already being used by the likes of ClaimID, Last.fm, Ma.gnolia, Wikitravel, and Yedda.

The goal of SocialPhysics is to give people more control over their digital identities: their online identities, personal information and social relationships.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I've been following the barrage of news regarding Data Portability with a mix of excitement and trepidation. I've been a proponent of OpenID, and regularly use services like PassPack to keep track of the ridiculous number of log-ins I seem to have accumulated. At the same time, I worry about what data is essentially mine, and what doesn't rightfully belong to me. I'm still not convinced that Robert Scoble owned the contact information for his 5000 "friends" on Facebook, and that is the facet of Data Portability that worries me, at least a little.

I'm finding that the more avenues I have to share my data online, the more I find myself wanting to pull what I already have out there back. I find it hard to imagine that I'm the only person who worries about the over-reaching umbrella of Google linking up to every other site who joins the Data Portability Workgroup and the sheer amount of amassed information any one entity could end up possessing about me.

DataPortability.org is heading up a workgroup that will hopefully do just that. While many groups and companies are taking part in this effort, the recent addition of a few big name players has attracted a lot of attention.

WebProNews spoke with Chris Saad, the Co-Founder and Chairman of Data Portability.

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.

Robert Scobles ban from Facebook early this month brought up the discussion again about ownership of user data in social networks such as MySpace, Facebook and others, as well as about data portability. Robert Scoble did violate the terms of service agreement with Facebook; so much seems to be clear. What his actual motivations were for his actions are not so clear though. You can check out his version of the story at Computerworld and also 1938 Media's Loren Feldman's takes one and two on this incident as well.

It does not matter what the actual reasons were and what exactly happened, but one thing is clear, it brought attention to an issue that everybody who uses social networking sites is just all very familiar with. I for myself consider it a pain to rebuild profiles and connections from scratch at every social media site again and again. It takes time and as most others, is time the only commodity I have always a shortage of. Then I look at my profiles at the different sites and how they developed over time to realize that they are all looking pretty much the same, I even hooked up with the same people at all those different sites again.

Hello DataPortability.org It is actually looking very promising that this initiative will result into a standard that will be adopted by many social media sites. They are not going to reinvent the wheel and start creating something from scratch, but use and "mash-up" existing standards and initiative to create something new specifically aimed to solve the data portability problem.

The social web is booming, signing up new users and generating new pieces of unique content at a steady clip. A recurring theme of the social web is "data portability," the ability to change providers without leaving behind accumulated contacts and content. Most nodes of the social web agree data portability is a good thing, but the exact process of authentication, authorization, and transport of a given user and his or her data is still up in the air. In this post I will take a deeper look at the current best practices of the social Web from the point of view of its major data hubs. We will take a detailed look at the right and wrong ways to request user data from social hubs large and small, and outline some action items for developers and business people interested in data portability and interoperability done right.

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.

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.

Chris Saad, Chairman of the Data Portability Working Group, confirmed to me this morning that Microsoft's David Treadwell, a VP at Windows Live, will be joining the organization. Microsoft is expected to make a formal announcement in the coming days. News first leaked out via a shadowy post at Computerworld this morning.