Social media aggregator Cliqset today announced a new beta version of its platform that aggregates activity feeds from 70 different social media sites, transforms them into normalized Activity Streams standard data and then pushes them out in real time.

The company's offers multiple ways to access the data through its API but also hopes that more users will stick with its own, now much improved, user interface. The first 200 ReadWriteWeb readers to click this link will gain access to the new beta version of the site.

The most important thing Cliqset is doing is probably transforming all these different update feeds into the standardized format called Activity Streams. That format is already being supported by Facebook, MySpace, Windows Live and Opera.

Michael Calore explains what Cliqset is doing with Activity Streams as follows:

A huge bonus is that Cliqset is using the emerging Activity Streams data specification to make all this happen. Activity Streams is an open-source XML-based format that uses a common actor-verb-asset model to report an activity on a social website. For example, "Amy shared a video" or "Mike rated this photo." It's a simple organizing principle that allows social web services to more easily talk to each other about what their users are doing.
But if not everyone is reporting their users' activity data using a common model, it becomes harder to get two services to talk to each other. And only a handful of sites are supporting Activity Streams right now.
As Cliqset co-founder Darren Bounds tells Webmonkey, Cliqset is actually re-writing all the aggregated data streams into the Activity Streams format, physically cleaning up the social web's mess as it goes.

Cliqset tells us that it's working on making a streaming API for this data available and let us in on some secret projects to bring real-time cross-platform data flowing to places around the web that it's not available today.

Right now you cannot easily pull Activity Streams feeds through Cliqset for people who have not signed up for the service themselves. It would be great if Cliqset began consuming the Webfinger protocol, for example and let me point at all my Google Contacts, discover their social media sites from around the web and then transform those into Activity Streams for consumption in other apps. That future isn't here and it may never be, but a web user can hope.

For now the company is using the long polling method and this newly normalized data to do some impressive things with its own user interface. Michael Calore goes into depth about that part of the project on Wired.com's WebMonkey blog. We'd like to recommend his post as our Real-Time Web Article of the Day, in fact. Check it out for a closer look at the innovative effort underway at Cliqset.

We're highlighting one article about the real-time web from off-site every day, leading up to the October 15th ReadWrite Real-Time Web Summit. Data normalization, Activity Streams, filtering and APIs are going to be big topics of conversation there. We hope you'll join us for those conversations.

It's a major move being worked on with both the Activity Streams and Open Social communities - it could push the rest of the web, outside of Facebook, in a direction that supports radical app innovation through the creation of a level playing field of readable data. And it could make MySpace a lot better, too.

Keller told us today that MySpace is working on increasing the amount and sophistication of user activity updates on the site in a number of different ways. In case anyone is chuckling and thinking MySpace doesn't matter, we should remember that only ten sites on the web are visited more often than MySpace still today. MySpace may be on the decline, but it's still hugely important and these moves it's making could help it become even more so.

Adding "Write" Functionality

MySpaceID currently allows sites around the web to offer sign-in using MySpace account credentials. The sites can then pull in some amount of a user's data from MySpace and use it to personalize the experience they have on the new site - friends lists can be synced and taste information can be gleaned from a profile to customize recommendations, for example.

The next step will be to bring in user activities from these third-party sites and display them in your MySpace user activity feed, much like Facebook Connect allows. This gives other sites access to distribution inside MySpace. Developers of other sites will be able to offer users the option of publishing their activities on these other sites back onto their MySpace profiles and friends' activity feeds.

Here's how MySpace's plan is unlike what Facebook is doing. The updates will be marked up for the types of activities they represent with standardized microformat code, beginning with the events format hCal and soon to include the book, movie or other review format hReview. Those little bits of code that will be added could have big consequences.

Keller says the company acknowledges that this won't be a small task for third-party developers, so in the meantime she is working on automated methods of pulling user data in from other sites' Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) and marking them up automatically, with the microformat code communicating what kind of updates they are (events, reviews, etc.)

Why This is Important

This kind of data normalization creates the level playing field of information that allows new applications to be written and scale up through accessing and processing large quantities of information that have effectively been translated into the same "language." You want to build an application that processes hCal events? That will be a lot more appealing when the MySpace ecosystem of connected sites is all speaking that language.

Keller says that MySpace and the community of people working on building a common Activity Streams specification for all sites have been working closely with the Open Social community, the Google-led cross-site application platform that competes with the Facebook App platform. Keller says MySpace's new activity feed functionality will be delivered from within but extend upon the Open Social framework the company uses to connect with other sites now.

There isn't any indication yet that MySpace will make these marked-up updates available in bulk to developers for analysis; they will likely remain authenticated and limited in visibility to friends who have given approval. That would be an even bigger boost for innovation, but the promotion of the standardized data format is a huge step nonetheless.

What's In It for MySpace?

So if this has a lot of potential to be good for the web - what's in it for MySpace? Two things, primarily.

First, as Facebook grows rapidly in both user numbers and integration with sites around the web through its similar product Facebook Connect, MySpace is no longer the center of the web for millions of people. This kind of product facilitates that kind of relationship, and offering outside developers write-access to MySpace will incentivize more of them to support ongoing user-connection with MySpace. The microformatted markup makes this a lot smarter than Facebook Connect, frankly.

There is a risk that all the smarts in the world won't interest people in MySpace's declining profile, but the site remains one of the most popular on the web and a viable competitor to Facebook. (Facebook said they may or may not comment on this move by MySpace; we're still waiting to see if they'd like to.)

The goal for the program that Keller shared with us was different. She says that the microformats markup will enable the company to make smarter decisions in highlighting friends' updates and offering users' recommendations.

Keller says that MySpace is working on and will soon deploy technology that closely monitors what kind of friend updates users show interest in. If I often click on your photos but never read your blog posts, or I am very interested in your book reviews but don't care about your events listings, then MySpace will feature those kinds of your updates in my friends' activity feeds more or less prominently. Knowing what kinds of activities are being brought in from other sites will help make that more possible. The same information will facilitate smarter recommendations of content you might like.

That's why Monica Keller says "We don't want to do anything without semantics, to be honest. We can't afford to show a user content on their home page that they aren't going to like."

Watch for these new technologies to be announced in the coming weeks. They could have a big impact not just on the future of MySpace, but on much of the rest of the web as well.

In September of 2008, Expono went live with its site and made the bold choice to go with 100% cloud computing. Other sites like SmugMug have done this with great success and it feels like a growing trend. The lower cost and ease of scaling made cloud computing a sensible choice for Expono and the company set about building its incredible array of features. Those features, combined with the company's talented and ambitious team based in Oslo, Norway, make Expono a potential contender in an increasingly crowded media sharing marketplace.

You can go here to view a complete list of Expono's features. It's an impressive list, if not a little overwhelming, and you simply need to have a look for yourself. Here are a few of the main features we like:

Custom Location in Maps:

Geotagging has become a pretty popular thing to do with photographs. It's just interesting for us to see on a map where a photo was taken. It gives viewers added perspective, helps the photographer better organize their collections and could even help businesses attract customers. Expono has a feature that lets users drag a pin, place it on a map where the photo was taken and give that place a name for future reference. It's a simply but useful tool and a nice feature.

Language Translation:

Expono has not forgotten our Spanish-speaking friends and allows English-Spanish translations. The company is frantically working on translation to other languages like Danish, Russian, French and Hebrew and is actively searching for help translating other languages.

Full Quality Photo Sharing on Facebook:

Expono allows users to share full quality photos and activities and connect on Facebook. It looks pretty straightforward and easy to do:

"Simply go to Facebook Settings on Edit Services menu, press the "Connect with Facebook" button and follow the instructions. It takes 10-30 seconds!"

"After your accounts have been connected, you will be able to tag your Facebook friends on your photos like any other contacts you already have in your address book. With your Facebook friends now on Expono, you can add them to your contact groups, give them access to the photos you want them to see and tag them on your photos.

Face Tagging and Sharing to FriendFeed and Twitter:

Expono has extended its integration with Friendfeed and Twitter that allows interaction between users of those services:

"Earlier we had automatic photo uploads announcements to Friendfeed and Twitter every time you uploaded new photos to Expono. The functionality allowed our users to inform their followers and subscribers about newly uploaded photos in a innovative way. Now we have extended that to include direct sharing of public album and photos right from the Share menu, giving your subscribers and followers access to view your full quality photos with just 1 click."

Basically, you connect your Expono account with FriendFeed or Twitter, tag your friends' photos, add them to your contact groups and give them access to the photos you want them to see.

See what Expono's small but loyal group of followers are talking about on Twitter and also on FriendFeed.

Oh, did we mention Expono's context aware media RSS that allows users to enter a URL into your Wii Opera browser URL field, run it fullscreen and watch a slideshow on your TV? Don't forget authenticated RSS feeds, GPS support, photo editing, iPhoto photocasting, EXIF and IPTC support and much, much more. We also like that Expono takes your privacy very seriously.

This hungry startup (a core team of six, including Co-Founder and CEO Magnus Jonsson) means business when it says there are other exciting things in the works. Expono team member Daniel Bentes hinted at the company's interest in a developing a mobile site, similar to Flickr's new mobile site, that uses Apple's Core Location service right from Safari. Bentes says, "this kind of location awareness will be the future of not only search and discovery services, but even ad-based and paid content, giving even more value to viewers and readers alike. As of now, Apple's Core Location is the prime example of this ability". He adds that the company "...would like to implement the same kind of functionality on Expono.com for the coming iPhone version. But would REALLY love to implement it on the main web version as well, enabling this functionality to an even broader audience".

Like we said, there are other sites out there that do similar things. But when you combine all these things together and they are done well (in this case they did a great job), you get a very powerful and useful tool that just may be worth forking over your hard-earned money for. If you don't want to take our word for it, check out what our friend @CleverClogs had to say about Expono over on Friendfeed. She is quite knowledgeable and discriminating about such matters. You might want to also go to the Expono Customer Support Community on Get Satisfaction to see what others are saying and to throw in your own two cents.

Be sure to read the Expono blog for even more information and follow the company's Twitter updates @expono. The service is still in Beta, but you should have no problem getting an invite if you sign up at Expono.com.

At the OpenID blog, David Recordon wrote this morning, "This means that Google users signing into sites... now have a much better user experience, one on par with Facebook Connect." The screenshots below show the new login in action.

According to this morning's entry from Yariv Adan on the Google Code Blog, the new UI "is designed to streamline the federated login experience for users. Specifically, it's designed to ensure that the context of the Relying Party website is always available and visible, even in the extreme case where a confused user closes the Google approval window."

The post continues with a specific use case. OpenID products company JanRain is using the new API in their RPX offering. The first step on the login page "is identical to that of the 'full page' version, and does not require any changes in the Relying Party UI," read the blog."

In addition to signing into sites using their Google accounts, users are also sharing specific data with the Relying Party website. The data shared can range from the user's email, first and last name, preferred language, and country, to other information available through the Google Data API, including the user's Contacts List, Web Albums, or Calendar.

Adan writes, "Google strongly believes that the data our users trust us with belongs to them and should always be available for them to use. By providing users with more secure means to share their data, they can benefit from a much more streamlined, personalized and socially relevant experience when they log in to trusted websites."

The new process also allows a streamlined conversion process for Relying Party websites.

Why compare user numbers between a browser and a social network? Because there's every reason to believe that the two technologies are converging in the near term future. Here's why we believe that Firefox should be Facebook's biggest competition.

This isn't an apples and oranges situation, either.

Though we may not be sure about his prediction that Google will act before Firefox, we think Forrester's Jeremiah Owyang offers a very compelling vision of the future of browsers and social networks in his excellent report The Future of the Social Web.

"... in a bid to extend the reach of its new browser, Chrome, we expect Google to build OpenID and its associated friend connections into the browser; look for Firefox and eventually Internet Explorer to copy this feature. Facebook and MySpace will also likely build a way for users to surf the Web within the Facebook experience, retaining the social functionality. These connections won't be perfect, but they'll allow social networks to colonize communities and other parts of the Web, extending their experience out to other sites through the shared ID. As a result, in two years, portable identities will become a ubiquitous part of the online experience as they reach maturity."

It's only logical to extrapolate from that analysis that the line between browsers and social networks will become much less clear and the two types of software will very likely compete with each other.

The Browser as Social Network, Social Network as Browser

Within months not years, the Firefox browser is likely to look very, very different. The company must be scrambling to innovate even more than we can know, now that its primary source of revenue (Google) has launched its own browser. Both Firefox and Facebook are probably working very hard to figure out new models of generating advertising revenues - something both are dependent on but neither can take for granted.

Three weeks ago we wrote about Firefox's plans to build the command-line-type Ubiquity system into the address bar. That means your "apps" will be accessed and controlled through your browser.

If Facebook is looking more and more like an Operating System with its app platform, Firefox is too - with the added advantage of having access to apps on the desktop, the web and integrated Rich Internet Applications. Facebook launched its own desktop interface last week and we would be willing to bet that it is going to become much more browser-like in the near future, but Firefox has a huge running start in that department.

Facebook already has its own frames it uses for links shared through the site, holding the browsing experience inside the Facbook ethos. It's not hard to imagine a search bar being placed inside that frame.

In that same post about Ubiquity in Firefox we also looked at the Firefox user experience team's experimentation with removing the tabs from the browser and replacing them with an interface that looks a lot like iTunes.

Just like iTunes is all about the playlists, organizing content by type and category, Firefox may also start offering ways to organize the information you consume passively by browsing. Two weeks ago we covered proposals by Firefox lead designer Alex Faaborg to capture events, location and other microformatted information and serve it up other applications like Google Earth and calender.

Would Facebook like to build value on top of the data it collects from your browsing around the web? You'd better believe it would, undoubtedly that's a big part of the vision behind the much celebrated Facebook Connect. Facebook Connect requires that users give their permission to Facebook each time they want to connect it and the relative handful of pages that support the Connect login system. Firefox has a huge advantage in that it has de facto permission by users to interact with all the data from all the pages we visit in the browser. Facebook is going to want that too.

Firefox's Faaborg sees the browser as a first-class player in questions of Identity and Data Portability as well (much like Owyang predicts above). All Firefox has to do is start offering messaging between users and a News Feed of user activity across all the social networks people use already. Firefox could use Facebook Connect, for one thing. How well could Facebook compete with social software that prioritizes multiple personas (work/friends seeing different sides of you) and breaks free from the walled gardens of standard social networking? Those are approaches that Facebook will no doubt be moving towards soon as well.

Finally, Firefox is fighting hard in the mobile space. This is one place where Facebook already has a huge leg up. It will be a primary point of competition between the two companies in the future.

Facebook has a staff proven very skilled at building fundamentally social software. That's less the case with Firefox, whose developers and developer ecosystem are grounded in a history of the browser as a private affair.

Picture this, though. Add messaging, public profiles and activity streams to Firefox and we can imagine Ashton Kutcher level hype - no problem. (Firefox is already 300 times bigger than Kutcher, though!) The browser team may or may not be able to execute on these types of ideas across all their users, but their odds aren't bad and the browser turning social network already has far more active users than the social network turning browser does.

On May 1st South Carolina's Senator, Jim DeMint, officially asked the Senate Rules Committee to make the data available and just four days later the feed is here. Not everyone is happy about about the information being made publicly available like this, however.

John Wonderlich, policy director for the Sunlight Foundation, told Politico that the reason he's been given for the lack of XML feeds is this: "the secretary of the Senate has cited a general standing policy ... that they're not supposed to present votes in a comparative format, that senators have the right to present their votes however they want to...it's pretty bad."

Dave Lundy, acting executive director of the Chicago-based Better Government Association, told Politico again that: "It's a strategy to make information hard to find and hard to digest and hard to analyze...Call me a cynic, but I don't ... think [government entities] deserve the benefit of the doubt. We have ample experience to know that people try to hide information, even in plain sight."

Apparently, those problems were washed away this week by the tides of open technology. The Washington Post has offered something similar to what's now available for some time, but there's something to be said for what we hope will be a big, fat, official pipe of data.

We learned of the news this morning when New York Times technologist, Derek Willis, celebrated mention of the news by Rob Pierson, who yesterday began a new job leading new media initiatives for the House Democratic Caucus. The Sunlight Foundation said last week that neither the House nor the senate "maintain any reasonable database of lawmaker votes." The House of Representatives does release their votes in structured format, though.

Willis points out that the new Senate data feeds aren't perfect; the absence of Bioguide ID information linking Senators' names to their online profiles creates an unnecessary additional step for developers, for example.

It's exciting news none-the-less. "It's good to see high profile senators from both parties behind this," says John Musser, founder of the web's leading mashup and API directory, Programmable Web. "Those first steps are often the hardest. That is, just getting understanding of the value, getting buy-in and then having the data accessible in a developer friendly format. The next logical step is to wrap it in an API; having the XML is closer to having an RSS feed, there's not a lot of developer control of what data to retrieve. An API typically gives much more control over what data gets retrieved. Like 'give me all roll call votes for January 2009', versus 'here's the last 20 roll call votes.' Or all roll call votes by a specific senator, etc."

Musser says that he's seeing a broad movement towards increased access to government data. That work is being done by both official sources like this new Senate feed and the data-centric Recovery.org and by outside organizations like the Sunlight Foundation and the New York Times, work Musser is tracking closely.

What's left to open up? Check out, for example, this list of the 8 most desirable but unavailable government data sets, per Willis from the NYT. As of today, one of those can be checked off the list.

Microformats are one thing that the browser notices while serving up web pages. This type of markup designating certain types of information has just begun to be leveraged in real use cases. Alex Faaborg, Principle Designer on the Firefox team, has some interesting ideas about how the browser could leverage the microformatted information it comes across.

These are a few of the conceptual mock-ups he showed in his presentation; they aren't planned features - but it sure would be cool if they became reality.

Location

The gist of this idea is that information marked up with microformats as locations, events, etc. on pages around the web could be aggregated by Firefox and made available for viewing in other applications. Information made machine readable with the right markup could be passively captured and reused in different contexts to add new value. That's a pretty smart idea.

In this first mock-up you can see a user doing a search across multiple sites for apartments for rent. The browser captures all the locations viewed in the sidebar for organizing and viewing elsewhere.

In this next image you can see one resulting use case for the data captured above: viewing browsed addresses together in Google Earth.

Events

Location is just one type of microformat. Another is events listings. In the mock-up below, the browser has captured all of the events listings in a user's browsing history and made them available as a "ghost calendar" in Google Calender. Just a reminder - that event you stumbled across is happening later today!

Other types of microformats include designation of people, reviews, tags and more. All these item types could be pulled out of a person's browsing history and analyzed or viewed in new and different ways. There are websites and services doing this already but for the browser to do it too is a very interesting idea.

Firefox is a dynamic and widely used collection of software for which the future is wide open. This idea of capturing and leveraging microformats across applications is one of our favorite proposed directions for the future. The browser already sees this data, so doing something with it makes a whole lot of sense. To follow these and other ideas, check out Alex Faaborg's blog at Mozilla.

Firefox sunglasses image via Photobucket

If it did, that could be a real game changer. We'd love to introduce our smart and sassy readers to each other here and then see them be friends on social networks, mobile sites and all around the web. Just a pipe dream? That's what a brand new identity provider called Cliqset aims to make possible. We believe it's the first identity provider of its type that allows 3rd parties to change user profile information, not just read it.

Cliqset uses the OAuth data standard to do all this, so it doesn't even have to ask for your password to the networks you want to connect.

Who's using Cliqset so far? Unfortunately, the geeks behind Cliqset don't do a very good job explaining what they do and they don't have any examples other than their own site today at launch.

That could change soon, though. The company has released a variety of code libraries for developers to drop Cliqset support into their applications. At launch there are Java, iPhone and .net for Windows Mobile libraries. A PHP library is forthcoming. All the libraries will be open sourced and posted to Google Code.

Facebook Connect lets 3rd parties publish updates to a user's activity stream, but that's about it. We asked a number of hardcore identity geeks whether they had seen anything quite like Cliqset before and no one had. There are OpenID and related specifications aiming to accomplish just this, but nothing in the wild yet, according to the OpenID Foundation and Six Apart's David Recordon.

Recordon is a little concerned about seeing another company release an API to accomplish what Cliqset aims to do. "At first glance, it seems like Cliqset is leaning in the correct direction with their support of OAuth for APIs and OpenID for sign in, but are still creating their own APIs - ala Facebook Connect - when dealing with profiles and activities," he told us. "This is both yet another validation of the work by the wider DiSo community and opportunity to finalize the Portable Contacts and Activity Streams specifications for broad adoption on the social web."

We asked Cliqset specifically about Facebook Connect, whether it wasn't in the company's interest to implement a Read/Write capability in its identity system as well. They said they believed it was but that they expected the giant social network to take much longer to implement this key feature. By offering iPhone and Windows Mobile libraries right out of the gate, we think Cliqset could move quickly in the mobile world as well.

Unfortunately, the company isn't doing a terribly good job of explaining its fundamental value proposition so far. We're not the first site to cover Cliqset today (see PC World's coverage for example) and everyone else is writing up the company as just one more cross-site identity provider. There's more than that going on here, but we'll see if this startup with what it calls "the most robust APIs you'll find anywhere" is able to make the market headway that its innovative vision seems to warrant.

This morning the highly effective nonpartisan Sunlight Foundation launched a new microsite called Our Open Government List, where anyone can make suggestions for government transparency and all of us can vote on our favorite ideas. It's like Digg for steps to open up public data.

Anyone can submit ideas or vote on those already submitted; no account creation is required. Click on the titles and you can post and read comments on the idea.

What's in the lead so far? The number one vote getter this morning has been to create a "Digital deposit of government information to libraries." APIs and bulk data access, and metadata standards are also getting a lot of votes. Voting has just begun, though, so now is a great time to jump over to the site and have your voice be heard.

The Sunlight Foundation is a very respected organization and we're sure that the results of the voting will be seen by the Obama administration. The group is co-producing a sold-out Barcamp called TransparencyCamp in D.C. this weekend, and we hope they'll see some key Obama staffers there. So head on over to Our Open Government List and put in your two cents!

If you like ideas like this, you should check out the UK's Show Us a Better Way, a mashup contest to fund developer use of public data.

We don't know who the country's first CTO will be yet (there are rumors) but whoever it is should have plenty of great publicly generated ideas to consider as soon as he or she takes office. Given the delay in the appointment, we imagine the CTO will appreciate the Sunlight Foundation's help in meeting the 120 day deadline for transparency suggestions.

Pullara is a leader in Yahoo's work on Open Web standards and the open web community appears enthusiastic about his promotion at Yahoo! For full coverage of the move, see our write up on Jobwire, ReadWriteWeb's blog covering new hires in tech and new media.

Much like last month's summit on Activity Stream standards, we believe that yesterday's meeting was of historic proportion.

A big thanks to Plaxo's John McCrea for taking the photos below, giving them with a permissive Creative Commons license and for live blogging the meeting so extensively. All the photos below are his, with the exception of the photo of McCrea himself, which was taken by Will Norris. McCrea has covered the meeting in far more detail than we have - we just thought the event was striking enough that we wanted to post some pictures and make brief introductions to a handful of the players present. These are some of the folks most instrumental in building the web of the future, right now.

Brian Ellin, of JanRain, went through the history of OpenID user interfaces. He shared some of the things people currently type into the OpenID field of existing interfaces, like "elderly," "I HATE YOU LADY GAGA," "Hotmail," and their email addresses.

Vidoop's Chris Messina discussed the differences between identification, as in for blog comments, and authentication, as a method of gaining verified access to user data. That's something that people are increasingly looking to OAuth to accomplish, or an OAuth/OpenID hybrid.

Google's Breno de Medeiros said there needs to be a neutral 3rd party method of figuring out who users' identity providers are without asking them explicitly, something like how the DNS system works.

MySpace's Max Engel, the 8bitkid, says that MySpace users were generally comfortable with sharing data between AOL and MySpace but showed some confusion about which direction the data was flowing. He also said that "OAuth is the condom of the Open Web," and noted that "Facebook has free beef jerky!"

Facebook front end designer Julie Zhuo said she believes that 3rd party authentication implementations should keep the first screen really simple and delay things like extended permissions to later flows, in context.

Plaxo's John McCrea spells out what it's all about - free love between social networks. HeHis co-worker Joseph Smarr also presented the most impressive data of the day, a 92% success rate in user completion of Plaxo's new OpenID login process. That process packed more into a short space than Zhuo seemed to argue was ideal, but in this case it worked. Does Plaxo's new solution put too much emphasis on established big players like Google? It might, but it might very well be able to use some kind of neutral 3rd party cookie sniffing method like the Google team brought up yesterday to solve that problem.

There are lots of questions unanswered but things are progressing quickly. We expect the web to be a very different, and hopefully more exciting, place in the next few years. The people above are some of those we'll have to thank if these dreams for the future come true.

So far it's just a vision, albeit a pretty specific one, but we expect to see something like this on the market very soon. Is it what you want? Now is a good time to share your thoughts on the subject.

Marc Canter believes that the "dashboard" is the best metaphor to manage all this activity through. Millions of people are already familiar with this basic idea, having used My.Yahoo, iGoogle, Netvibes, Pageflakes, Jive Software or other services like this. (We like dashboards here at ReadWriteWeb a lot and recommend checking out this post on traits of a successful dashboard for tips on setting one up for yourself.)

Your DiSO dashboard might serve as a new interface for your blog, your social networking account, or be a stand alone service itself. The parts of your dashboard that you made public would be discoverable and viewable by other people. What would it bring together for you to access all in one place? This is the meat of Canter's proposal. (Update: Actually, Canter stopped by in comments below to clarify that it's the outline structure of these data collected in a dashboard that's really the meat of his proposal. He says he's working on an editor to edit such outlines, in fact. See his comment below for clarification.)

• Your status and availability, see and change these from your dashboard.
• Widgets and gadgets for doing various things, just like people add to dashboards now.
• Your incoming subscriptions (RSS, friends' new media published, perhaps some email).
• Your published media and content going out, manageable in the dashboard. Not just blog posts, microblogging messages and media - this could include your comments from around the web, reviews you've posted of products, testimonials people have written about you, music playlists - you name it.
• Access controls to all your content, determine what's public, what's private, what's viewable by friends, family, co-workers or members of another group. This is a very important part of the distributed social networking vision.
• Your various accounts and identification. Think of this as a virtual wallet, though Canter makes no mention of commercial activities we can assume that payment methods like your PayPal balance or online banking updates would ideally be included in your private dashboard.
• Your "social graph" aggregated. See all your contact lists in one place, including links to the dashboards and various social networking accounts that each contact has given you permission to view. Ask from your dashboard for permission to connect with those contacts in new places.

DiSo Dashboard Outline

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: outline diso)

The idea is that the DiSO Dashboard would be a place to read, write, manage, make discoverable, connect and normalize the data for all your activities around the web. The data standards aren't figured out yet, but major social networking vendors are meeting now to work them out.

How would it look? What would be surfaced to users at various levels of the interface? We hope that vendors make that highly customizable but default settings are something that needs to be figured out.

What do you think? Would you like a dashboard like this? What else would you like in it? Speak up now, these services could be a big part of your experience on the web soon and they are being planned and built as we speak.

The folks over at advertising firm Razorfish put together an interesting slide deck today illustrating what kinds of things would be possible if Amazon and iTunes were to implement Facebook Connect. It's a very good jumping off point for conversation about the possibilities in general, so we've embedded it below.

Portable Social Graphs - Imagining their Potential

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: retail marketing)

What Would You Like to See Social Network Data Used For?

Filtering reviews or recommendations by your friends list or the interests you've expressed on a social network are certainly very interesting ideas but we feel like this is probably just the beginning of what's possible.

We'd like to be introduced to recommended friends on 3rd party sites based on our friends and interests expressed on our social network. We'd like to be able to see aggregate benchmarks on sites tracking different parts of our lives relative to our circle of friends and the world at large. For example, financial services site Mint might tell us "compared to your circle of friends (as defined by Facebook, Wordpress or Twitter) you've had an unusual increase in transportation costs lately. Is it time to start asking people to come to your part of town more often for gatherings?" Add some site-specific privacy and things could get really interesting. Knitting social network Ravelry might say "why don't you not make yourself that red scarf - one of your friends, though we won't say who, is making one for you right now for the holidays."

What kinds of things would you like to do with your portable social network data?

See also: Facebook Connect vs. OpenID: Who Will Emerge Victorious?

That's only going to be more true in the future, so if you'd like to have a say in how it all goes down - now's the time to get involved. The OpenID Foundation is one of the leading organizations in the new standards world and it's having its first ever election of community board members this month. Nominations close Monday and the voting begins on Wednesday.

Individuals will have to pay a $25 Foundation membership fee in order to vote, but this author just paid his and is looking forward to pulling the virtual voter's lever. Nominees so far are listed below.

What Are the Issues?

OpenID usability, getting major players to respect incoming OpenID and not just authenticate their own users elsewhere with OpenID, the personal data payload that travels with OpenID and many other difficult questions remain unanswered, despite all the progress the Foundation and other organizations have made in the last year.

A year ago this week we wrote a post saying that OpenID was in serious trouble. One year later, the situation seems to have improved quite a lot. That's thanks not just to the work of the OpenID Foundation, but they deserve a large part of the credit.

The protocol is far from out of the woods, though, and so this election is going to be an important one.

Who's Been Nominated?

So far twelve people have been nominated. Once you register as a Foundation member, you can see the nominees and their position statements. More nominations will likely occur before this weekend is over. Seven of the following twelve total number of people nominated by Monday will get positions on the board. Here's who's been nominated so far.

Johannes Ernst - founder and CEO of startup Netmesh
David Recordon - is from SixApart and is one of the most publicly visible members of the OpenID community
Mike Kirkwood - CEO of iPhone-centric medical patient data service Polka
Eric Sachs - Product Manager at Google
Snorri Giorgetti - OpenID Foundation's European Representative
Eran Hammer-Lahav - Open Web Evangelist at Yahoo! and OAuth lover
Allen Tom - Architect, Yahoo! Membership
Scott Kveton - Current OpenID Foundation Chair and VP Open Platforms at Vidoop
Nat Sakimura - Identity tech wonk from Japan
Brian Kissel - CEO of JanRain, makers of MyOpenID.com
John Bradley - OpenID security wonk
Martin Atkins - an OpenSocial and identity developer

Which seven of those people do you want driving the future of the OpenID Foundation? Register as a member, read their policy statements and you can have your hopes for this important technology paradigm recognized.

As pointed out by intrepid explorer of the interwebs Chris Messina, there's now live code for OpenID authentication inside every MySpace user's profile. View the source on yours and you'll see it. This should be more than just single sign-on, too.

According to John McCrea's live-blogged coverage of the much needed OpenID/OAuth UX Summit this weekend, MySpace has some interesting plans up its big, teenaged sleeve. There Max Engel, MySpace's Product Manager of "Data Availability" said that the company will support OpenID, OAuth, and a hybrid of the two. They will use a pop-up iframe that allows the user to stay in context.

Does that imply that there will be OpenID and OAuth logins on MySpace for use with other OpenID providers' accounts? Or only that MySpace will give the world an iFrame the rest of us can use to login using our MySpace ID as an OpenID? Probably the latter, but maybe the former!

Either way, really, this is great news. Facebook Connect is making it easy for 3rd party websites to tie their users to Facebook authentication and friends lists, but MySpace has the opportunity to reach a different constituency and raise the bar on both how much user data is exposed to developer and how well it's protected for privacy-minded users.

We hope that the addition of OpenID code to MySpace profiles means we can see something exciting and new in production soon.