LinkedIn, SixApart and Flickr People Join DataPortability.org: Is This Stuff For Real?
The Data Portability Working Group is announcing today that key people from LinkedIn, Flickr, SixApart and Twitter are joining the group. These new names are just the most visible part of a groundswell of new interest in the group coming since this week's news that key players at Google and Facebook have joined.
LinkedIn, the social networking code-word for "business," is a great addition to the discussion, lest anyone think these aren't serious matters.
The new additions include Steve Ganz, Senior Web Developer at LinkedIn, Matthew Rothenberg, Product Strategy and Management at Flickr, David Recordon, the point-person for all things OpenID related at SixApart, and Blain Cook, a developer at Twitter.
Heavy Hitters
Like the individuals from Google and Facebook who joined the working group earlier this week, these aren't random people who just happen to work at these major companies. Brad Fitzpatrick, the inventor of LiveJournal and one of the primary minds behind OpenID, the concept of the Social Graph and the Google-led OpenSocial platform, joined from Google. Benjamin Ling, who runs the entire Facebook platform, the crown jewel of the company, joined from Facebook.
Ganz, from LinkedIn, presumably has the strong support of founder Reid Hoffman as well. Hoffman is one of the most articulate top executives you'll find regarding data portability issues. Update: Check this out, LInkedIn even posted about the Data Portability issue on their blog today - wouldn't it be great if Google did that?
That said, all of these people have just joined a working group. Now the real work begins. History offers many examples of working groups that went nowhere. Odds are never good that big company's are going to open up and things in this world are going to get better! But we can hope, cheer and cajole.
Along with the unconfirmed rumor that Google, IBM and Verisign are in talks to join the OpenID Foundation - today's growth of the Data Portability work group offers more hope that 2008 could be a year of substantial change regarding user control over data and privacy. Here's hoping the big guys can bring market share and experience without overwhelming the innovation and user-centric motivation of some of the smaller players in these discussions.
Share
Comments
Subscribe to comments for this post OR Subscribe to comments for all ReadWriteWeb posts
Although certainly promising, I think the news of all these folks joining DP.org is a bit overblown. There's a bit of hyperbole in the blogosphere about this.
So they've joined the organization? That means next to nothing in terms of actual results. It's a step in the right direction, but that's it.
Marshall, you're very astute to say that joining a group isn't the accomplishment, it's when we get new meaningful interop between competitive products, giving users choice and making the basis of competition performance, features and price, not how locked-in the users are.
No idea on percentages, but for people like me with
My opinion, and most likely totally off-- everybody's joining because it's an easy, free, blogosphere bump. If they feel as I do, that this will amount to next to nothing, then why not join? Everybody covers it, I'd join too.
Lo siento there, I used a 'less than' sign like some kind of knob and cut off my paragraph. Anyway probably for the best, but the paragraph was basically:
For people like me with less than about 100 friends, autmated tools may or may not make anything any easier.
Again, sorry.
Agree with previous posters. It's unlikely that LinkedIn, Facebook will give up much: their business models depend too much on keeping that data proprietary and inside their system. My guess is that they'll agree to a standard so minimal -- think "Name", "Age", "Address" -- as to be meaningless.
For anything significant to happen here, it has to begin with the users themselves -- not the social network providers.
They're talking to people at the simile project also, if the mailing list is any indication.
in the world, at least from the ecological context, to the myxtical context, everything is connected to everything, anyway, already...
"science" and "the mind" are the only things that have to create subsets of wholeness in order to function...
if there is progress, on-the-way to something, everybody is going to have to talk to everybody sooner or later, call it interoperability, or cooperation, doesn't mattter
and here is the interesting thing... the data is not what is portable... the data just is, it is the systems and organizations that are going to become agile, mobile, flexible.... and business models will have to adjust...
facebook needs to talk to myspace one of these days, and "old guys" will be the ones still thinking they can monetize parts of the whole....