Paul's Web Space 2.1

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:

• Workgroup Home Page
• Frequently Asked Questions
• Google Group
• Twitter Feed

Labels: dataportability, facebook, google, openid, standards

   Link: http://www.dataportability.org/

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Social Media Proliferation

I'm going a little crazy with all the different social media systems, accounts, applications, etc., which often seem to overlap with each other. I think this really became obvious when I started using Facebook more, where you can increasingly integrate all kinds of applications (including social media ones).

You post your status on Facebook, but you can also update your Twitter status via a facebook app, and both status statement (can) appear on your Facebook profile. One popular application on Facebook is called Causes, but you can also integrate your Change.org profile (which includes changes, organizations, politicians, etc., all things you can support via separate Facebook applications (Causes or US Politics).

On top of all that, Change.org and Facebook are two of many social networks. I probably don't even remember all of the social networks that I have joined, but of course this includes MySpace and LinkedIn, as well as Tribe, Care2, and the Omidyar Network. Managing all of these is a large time sink, and never really accomplished, and of course managing identity in general becomes ever more challenging base upon all of the aforementioned services and hundreds of others. Is OpenID the answer? I plan to start trying to figure that out soon. A speaker at Digial Media Conference I attended a few weeks ago predicted that one of the major coming trends in new media will be a merger or consolidation of social networks, and I don't know if this means actual combination of operations, or more likely, some networking solution that makes integration even more seamless than that afforded by Facebook apps - which is a very cool major step along the way, and I'm sure is poised to take it even further.

Facebook is the new LinkedIn, and Change.org, and Twitter, and Flixter, and Flickr, and....

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Labels: community, facebook, openid, socialmedia, socialnetworks

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