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The OpenID Foundation announced the launch of its first international chapter today to big accolades in Japan. The creation of the Japanese OpenID chapter was participated in by a host of big web companies there and made the front page of Google News Japan. Giant social networking site Mixi also announced that it would soon support OpenID.

OpenID Europe may become the next international chapter of the Foundation. See below for the presentation used to announce the Japanese chapter.

I'm listening now to a telephone press conference with top Microsoft execs about the company's new strategy shift towards Data Portability and Interoperability for their high volume products like Windows and Office. Ray Ozzie says it is opening up the same APIs that internal developers use out into the public at large. Has Google made announcements like this? Believe it or not, Microsoft may be putting a stake in the ground that's ahead of Google on openness and other important directions for the future. Details from the call dampened my enthusiasm a bit but the announcement is notable none the less.

Our attention is stretched so thin these days that there are times when I have actually tried to register for what I thought was a new service only to realize later that I already had an account -- it just got lost in the shuffle. With so many new web sites and services vying for our attention it is easy to feel the effects of social media fatigue. Andrew Shuttleworth, a social media junky living in Japan, thought it might be helpful to try to map his social media usage. The result is a staggering view of how information we put on the web flows.

The OpenID Foundation is announcing this morning that Google, IBM, Microsoft, VeriSign and Yahoo! have taken seats as the organization's first corporate board members.

OpenID is a protocol for authenticating your identity through a single chosen provider instead of creating unique accounts at every website you use.

Tulsa, Oklahoma based authentication service Vidoop announced today that it has hired Scott Kveton, Chair of the OpenID Foundation, to be the company's VP of Open Platforms and the Director of the company's new West Coast office in Portland, Oregon. With the move Kveton ends a short run at the heavily funded and very interesting MyStrands recommendation service, a development that raises some questions about that otherwise strong looking operation.

The addition of Kveton to its staff should push Vidoop into the public consciousness in a big way, concerning OpenID and open platforms.

Google today announced the release of a new API for graphing social net connections on the web at large. The Social Graph API is a way for developers of social applications to let users easily find data on their social connections across the open web. The information the API returns can be useful in helping users locate and add their friends when starting up at a new social application.

Steve O'Hear (who edits our digital lifestyle blog last100) has an interesting post on his ZDNet blog that questions whether Google's OpenSocial initiative is at all about data portability, or if in fact it really just about widget standardization. O'Hear quotes heavily from a recent article by Marc Canter, who is a strong advocate for open standards and data portability, that ran on CNet.

Digg made a post to the company's blog this morning announcing that they are officially joining the DataPortability.org Working Group. Digg follows Facebook, Google, Microsoft and many other companies in getting on board to discuss protocols that will make it easier for users to move their data from one site to another while still protecting their privacy.

The company posted more specifics about its embrace of data standards than almost any of the other participating companies has. Read more below, plus check out some related resources that we hope you'll find useful.

Chris Saad, Chairman of the Data Portability Working Group, confirmed to me this morning that Microsoft's David Treadwell, a VP at Windows Live, will be joining the organization. Microsoft is expected to make a formal announcement in the coming days. News first leaked out via a shadowy post at Computerworld this morning.

The Working Group aims to foster standard protocols for users to port their identities, friends and digital assets from one site online to another, as they see fit. See the explanatory video at the end of this post for another explanation of the general concepts. Still another good explanation can be found in John Battelle's excellent post earlier this month on how companies should compete on quality of service more than data lock-in.

Nonprofit tech analysts Idealware released a collection of resources today that anyone can use to evaluate APIs under consideration. Titled “Getting Your Systems Talking: A Framework to Evaluate APIs and Data Exchange Features,” the guide at its core is a worksheet that walks you through more than 30 different technical questions you should ask about any new data exchange technology you're evaluating. It's free to download.

While data portability is a hot topic of the day, there hasn't been a lot of tangible work done around the details yet. Idealware's guide could make implementation of these themes much more manageable. Readers may also be interested in this related discussion about data portability use cases over at the DataPortability.org public discussion.