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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Blue Beanie Day

Today is Blue Beanie Day 2007 — an effort to increase support for the notion of designing sites and applications using web standards and accessibility guidelines. It is being celebrated on Flickr and Facebook, and is organized by the Facebook group named after the book Designing With Web Standards by Jeffrey Zeldman — the "bible" of web standards web development using Cascading Style Sheets (or CSS).

Another, perhaps more serious, long-term effort to promote this cause is the Web Standards Project. The movement toward improving the accessibility of web sites is embodied in the W3C Web Accessibility Initiative.

I'm a long-time supporter of these efforts, both by providing vocal support and by practicing these methods myself and in projects that I manage to the greatest practical extent. For the festivities, I took my first self-portrait with my Treo 750 last night (using that little fisheye mirror), sporting the spiffy blue baseball cap given out at the last Freedom to Connect conference in Silver Spring, organized by David Isenberg.

Labels: bluebeanieday2007, browsers, standards, webstandards

   Link: http://www.flickr.com/groups/bluebeanieday2007/

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