After a brief hiatus last week as Trent and Steve were otherwise indisposed, the DataPortability: In-Motion Podcast is back at half strength. Steve is still MIA, but joining Trent in the virtual studio is Bob Ngu, Founder of Jiggyme.com, a video aggregation startup that is beginning to focus specifically on technology videos.
Bob has been an active contributor to the DataPortability Project since March, and was highlighted in the project’s May report. The spotlight was shined on his DataPortability: In the Wild blog series. In this series, Bob outlines his discussions with various people involved with data portability. Among the areas he’s covered so far include:
The show is kicked off with a discussion about his recent speculation that Microsoft could buy Facebook and keep it closed. Scoble talks about the services and tools like FriendFeed that offer alternate news streams to counter the Facebook hegemony. The discussion also flowed around automated behavior tracking, advertizing, and the interplay between control/privacy within various portable data models.
Of particular interest is Scoble’s view of the inevitability of an open flow of user data:
Openness does win in the end. It will just take a little bit of time to get there. We’ll see a lot of new stuff come along to make it easier for users to open these systems up.
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.
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:
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 
