: Name: Paul Hyland; Location: Silver Spring, Maryland, United States

I'm the executive producer for the web site of a nonprofit publisher of education news, information, and resources, I play in a band, and I work on analyzing and influencing the impact of computers on society. I love my partner in life and my daughter very much.

My Daughter

She hangs w/ her peeps
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Videos:
She Walks @ 1 (9.6MB)
She Drums @ 2 (2.6MB)

Paul's Web Space 2.1

Politics, Culture, Technology

Stories about cool events I've attended, musings about social media and other technology, and commentary about people, issues, ideas, whatever. I've had a web site since 1994, at my own domain since 1997, and switched it to blog format in 2005. Now, in 2008, I've added labels, shuffled things around a bit and fixed some style and UI quirks - hence 2.1. Watch for more widgets and microformats....

Monday, January 14, 2008

Data Portability Movement Grows

Big news in data portability - Facebook, Google, and Plaxo have joined the DataPortability Workgroup. Particularly in the case of Facebook, this is big news. Listen to Robert Scoble discuss his experience with Facebook and Plaxo, describing why he was temporarily kicked off of Facebook for automated importing of data to Plaxo. He points out that Facebook's policies in this area are hypocritical, that they are all about sucking up your data wherever they can find it, but prevent you from moving data out to other applications. Read more about this development and its importance in ReadWriteWeb and TechCrunch.

This is a fast-moving project, so early in the new year, as hot on the heals of that announcement we hear that individual members from the companies LinkedIn, Flickr, SixApart, and Twitter have also joined the Workgroup, a move LinkedIn touts in its own blog. (Read more analysis in ReadWriteWeb.) Following closely behind are individuals from Drupal, NetVibes and MyStrands. And to top it all off, Google, IBM, and Verisign are reportedly in talks to join the OpenID Foundation

What is Data Portability? According to Wikipedia, it is "Data portability is the capability to control, share, and move data from one system to another." OpenID (a founding partner in the Data Portability Workgroup) is a free and easy way to use a single digital identity across the Internet. A closely-allied concept from the world of MicroFormats is the idea of Social Network Portability, or the tools and interfaces that would allow users to easily move information about themselves and their contacts between different social networks.

The first I heard of these concepts was when I started reading about the Data Sharing Summit last fall in Richmond, CA. Jeremiah Owyang offers a very well defined set of goals for the data portability movement on his blog.

Here are some places to learn more about it and stay up-to-date on developments:

Labels: dataportability, facebook, google, openid, standards