For Plaxo, we have Joseph Smarr, Chief Platform Architect, and John McCrae, VP Marketing, talking about the acquisition and how it furthers data portability. Specifically, Smarr made it clear that the name of the game in portability is not making everything homogeneous, but rather opening up the flow of communication across systems:
Data portability is about empowering users to connect the tools they use so they don’t have to repeat themselves over and over again. So that the information can flow for others to discover it. It would be a mistake to characterize it as making everything exactly the same.
On the same thread, returning guest Kevin Marks, Developer Advocate for Google’s OpenSocial project, highlights their commitment to the openness of data portability:
One company can’t hold anything hostage because we’re connecting together open standards. All these pieces can be supplied by multiple parties. You can interoperate without having to have a business negotiation because you can write to the standard and the standard works.
In the discussion, Marks also corrects some common misconceptions around Google’s Friend Connect. Some of the reporting about it mistakenly assumed that Google would be siphoning off the friendship graph when using it’s system to connect sites. He clarifies that Friend Connect enables the portability of user data by mapping the connections, and isn’t storing the data itself.
There is a lot of focus in the DataPortability Project about making it easier to access user data. Another aspect to data portability, in general, is an analogous set of activities around enabling other data on the web to be more machine accessible. A few groups have been approaching this issue in various ways, many of whom work under the umbrella of the Semantic Web community. One subset of people focusing their efforts on this are taking what they call the Linked Data approach.
At a recent Cambridge SemWeb Gathering at MIT, Kingsley Idehen, CEO of OpenLink Software and a founder of the DBPedia project, had a great term for where he sees himself within the greater context of people working on these issues:
I like to say that I belong to the Semantic Web Community, but I’m a member of the Linked Data Tribe.
I found this concept of a tiered relationship and allegiance illuminating. Talking about it with him, he makes a distinction between the community as a whole and the fact that he focuses on a specific set of actionable efforts. It has been this sense of “what can be done right now” that has helped build upon what others are doing to move toward the goals of the community as a whole.
For example, I recently discussed how microformat markup could benefit the Semantic Web with Danny Ayers, an RDF/SemWeb guru working for Talis. Similarly, Ivan Herman gave a talk at the gathering about how to leverage RDFa within the context of an existing XHTML web page. Both examples are stepping stones in the direction of truly portable data on the web, and something that Kingsley considers the “data substrate” upon which Linked Data representations can be built.
To that end, I’m on a mini crusade to encourage developers to take the extra few minutes required to consider how their display layers can expose their content with effective markup. Rather than everyone having to learn OWL, RDF, and SPARQL before any progress can be made, there are some simple steps that will catalyze further steps. It’s really not that hard, and even if you’re not a developer you can mark up your own blogs and pages with microformats to provide search engines with much-needed context to describe your content.
NOTE:I’m purposefully not diving too deep here into the real “meat” of Linked Data. Instead, I hope you’ll spend a couple clicks checking out the simplicity of what can be done to help build the “data substrate”.
His company was on the ground and selling the data portability vision in 2006, and met with significant resistence by the same players embracing the DataPortability Project today. He talks about the approach taken by the Open SN specification, touching on the unfortunate naming collision with OpenSocial (with which there is no relationship). Beyond the technical details how FindMeOn.com leverages the format (ie. key-signed trusted relationship sharing), the story itself is worth hearing from an early advocate.
Of note is Jonathan’s quote about the resistance he encountered back in 2006 and where we are today:
It was like this very weird cultural shift, where almost overnight people went from data portability is absolutely evil to we love data portability. Cultural shifts always happen, but I’m still absolutely amazed at how fast it happened. Usually people warm up to ideas like this over a year or two, but this was kind of like an overnight thing.
Update:Jonathan posted a follow-up to the interview expanding on the discussion. It’s a great augmentation to the conversation.
Leading into the discussion, we hit some top-level news:
I’m doing enough work with the DataPortability Project these days that I need a “homebase” where I can collect my notes. The collaboration tools and spaces we’re using within the group are great, but this is a quiet little corner where I can keep notes and otherwise drive traffic around the specific projects in which I’m involved.
The idea of portable data isn’t really very new. In fact, it’s been around since we learned to write on paper (as opposed to those cave walls - talk about a silo of information). The recent twist (and reason for all the hubub) is really around the portability of “personally-contributed” data.
Basically, when signing up to a service users expect that any information they provide can be used by the service, but that they ultimately retain the rights to extract the data and take it somewhere else any time they want. Unfortunately, there are both some technical and legal hurdles these folks will have to overcome before this can happen. Both sets can be overcome, but doing so will come with a price (what doesn’t?).
In the end, defining a set of standards for the portability of personal data makes absolute sense. Getting there, however, will require a clear specification of what “personal data” includes. For example, does it include all of the ratings you’ve made to the content on a site? And what about your posts (eg. reviews, comments, etc.)?
For all these questions and more, I suggest you plug into the DataPortability group. As Chris Saad says in a recent post:
It seems that the web will dramaticlly evolve again this year. It used to be the Web of Pages, most recently it evolved into the Web of People… it seems in 2008 the Web of Data begins to take root.
In addition to a spiffy new DataPortability Project logo, the fifth episode of the 
The idea of portable data isn’t really very new. In fact, it’s been around since we learned to write on paper (as opposed to those cave walls - talk about a silo of information). The recent twist (and reason for 
