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.

While the move is a significant step in the right direction for the social network and its users, a few significant players in the data portability discussion are here to remind us that we aren't there quite yet.

Data portability is the idea that users are, and should be, in control of their data, how its used, and have access to it at any time. Beyond this, data portability inherently implies data interoperability-- the ability for your identity and social graph data to be used across any site or service, as controlled by the end user, and therefore requires the use of open web standards. [...] Facebook continues to maintain, under their TOS, the last word on your data usage through an all-encompassing license to do what they wish with your data (including sub-license it to other entities).

Leonard goes on to point out that, while you may now be able to more easily download your data to manipulate separately, it will still remain on Facebook's servers. You cannot remove it.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation similarly lauded and chastised Facebook's efforts this morning, saying that the feature brought Facebook closer in line with its Bill of Privacy Rights for Social Networking. The EFF offered a series of recommendations for Facebook to make it easier for its users to switch services if they so desired. Part of those recommendations included the ability to export more of your social connections and contact information, the ability for users to opt-out of allowing their contact information to be exported, and even the possibility of contact information available as a separate file.

Both the EFF and Leonard seem to agree that Facebook has made a big step to data accessibility, but have yet another step (or two, or 10) to get to "data portability". Leonard urged the site to adopt the DataPortability Project's Portability Policy, which she calls "the first true step towards data portability, transparency and end user control."

So, for the new feature, we have a resounding "here, here!", but we're reserving the real applause for the day when users can actually download their data and delete it off of Facebook's servers.

Further, even though Microsoft keeps talking about data portability, this announcement is not about their participation in DataPortability.org. Today's announcement is strictly about contact data, and it is strictly about Microsoft and these five sites. So while it is technically about making some data more open and portable, the old silos still exist -- there are just a few new paths cut between a handful of them. (To be fair, Microsoft's end of the contact data is open to everyone via their Contacts API, which has been around since last April. DataPortability.org, though, is about using existing, open standards to share all user data.)

Microsoft did mention their involvement in DataPortability.org in their announcement of today's news, however, saying that this and it are natural steps in their "pursuit of data portability to put users at the center of their online experience, while at the same time being thoughtful about balancing user security and privacy with the experience." Here's hoping everyone continues to open up.

In the game below you can choose to play the role of any of 5 different players: Google, MySpace, Microsoft, the Data Portability Project, or Facebook. You can then predict what will happen, or voice your opinion about what should happen. Or both.

Example of game play: Let's say you chose to play as the Data Portability Project. You can predict that Data Portability will "criticize the vendors and encourage a vendor neutral approach." If you voice an opinion, you are guided by several "advisors" - in this case we have ReadWriteWeb, CNET and Forrester Research. The difference between predicting and voicing an opinion is that you may not necessarily agree with what you predict Data Portability or any of the different roles will do, so you can also cast your opinion about what you think they should do!

This is the second in a series of games that we'll run over the next few months on ReadWriteWeb; the first dealt with Google App Engine. In about a week, we'll be sharing the results of both what you think the different players will and should do in the future. Please share any additional thoughts on this issue in the comments below.

Disclosure: One of our writers, Sean Ammirati, is on the Impact Games advisory board.

Here now are the results, showing how RWW readers think 5 of the major players - Google, Microsoft, MySpace, Facebook, and the non-profit Data Portability Project - will play out the future of Data Portability.

The Results

A reminder that the 'opinion' category is what you hope will happen and 'prediction' is what you think will happen.

Two points were consistent with our expectations:

• The majority hoped Facebook will merge, yet predicted that they won't.
• The majority hoped Microsoft will advocate open standards, yet most expected them to launch a competing platform.

One result that surprised us was that many people didn't expect the Data Portability Project to endorse a specific platform. Given their roadmap, this would not have been our guess.

For more on the topic of the future of Data Portability, see Chris Messina's post today on the battle for the future of the social web and Dave McClure's response.

What do you think of the results? Do you think Facebook and Microsoft will listen to what early adopters think they should do?

"Of course there should be a simple Delete button. It should do the typical "Are you sure? YOu can use Deactivate if you think you might come back?" confirmation process. But it is NOT Facebook's place to babysit users. If someone deletes their info and regrets it... well, that's life.

I despair of companies ever learning this though. Remember the horror stories about canceling AOL accounts? Everyone agreed that AOL should make it easy and yet here we are with not only Facebook but a bunch of other social media sites making it hard to control my data.

For all of the lip service given to data portability and that it's my data, most companies don't really believe it. Oh, they'll make it easy to import your data from other services... but export? Delete? Not so much."

ReadWriteTalk host Sean Ammirati this week interviewed Chris Saad, the co-founder of DataPortability.org, to ask him how the group has been progressing - and perhaps more importantly where it's headed next.

As Sean explained in his intro, since being founded about 6 months ago one of Data Portability's primary goals has been to 'develop a narrative' for data portability. That has largely been successful and the topic was actively discussed at SxSW and Web 2.0 Expo this year. Sean asked Chris what is next on the list of things for DataPortability.org to do? He responded that technical best practices are next up:

"...if we don't deliver a fairly solid set of best practices, particularly technical best practices - preferably the early versions of the policy and user experience best practices as well - I would be slightly disappointed. It's a massive group with a really important and broad problem domain. So I'm extremely proud of the group so far. But I think we're well on our way to delivering a good and comprehensive first draft of our technical best practices."

As an example, Chris pointed to "a document or a set of documents that explains how one would implement, let's say, logging in, discovering what services a user uses, how you would authenticate against those services, how you would expect to get certain of those data back, and perhaps how you would go about updating that data."

Getting Facebook On Board

It's fair to say that some of the big vendors still haven't totally embraced Data Portability, despite the public displays of support from the likes of Google, Microsoft and Facebook. In particular, Chris Saad noted that "Facebook is the least communicative" of the big Internet companies when it comes to liaising with DataPortability.org. However he has been very happy with progress made by Microsoft, Google, and MySpace.

In the podcast, Sean referenced a RWW interview with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, in which Zuckerberg told Marshall Kirkpatrick: "We are philosophically aligned with the Data Portability movement, but we're pushing it our own way to make the world a more opened place." Zuckerberg's point being that Facebook is focusing on questions of privacy and user control, as perhaps more important pieces of the data portability puzzle.

Chris Saad's response to that was: "I don't believe that it's a zero-sum game where privacy needs to give way to Data Portability or vice versa." He went on to explain:

"...I think with a level of common sense and with the checks and balances that we're building into the architecture, that privacy will be not an off-shoot, but it will be dealt with and dealt with in the only way that it can. I'm making it analogous it to Wi-Fi. Just because you can't connect to a Wi-fi. hotspot doesn't mean that you choose to. And when you connect, it doesn't mean that it's a free flow. It means you may need to put in your password and username to grant permission and various things. And that's very much analogous to what we're doing."

So according to Chris, "privacy is not being ignored" in the Data Portability movement. Certainly the technical best practices the group is working on will help companies like Facebook adapt to the emerging world of data portability. The question is: will Facebook pay attention to them? It will also be interesting to see how much 'walking the talk' Microsoft and Google do.

Is this what data portability looks like? Or are these steps just being taken to fend off legal challenges concerning unfair monopolistic practices? Does that matter, really, if the effect is the same?

Now that Bill Gates is gone, as of last week, a new era has officially begun at Microsoft. Skepticism runs deep, however, and no one is sure whether the giant company's recent rhetoric about openness and a new light-weight future are for real.

Insiders working to advance the community of standards based openness tell us that they are getting a better feeling from Microsoft than many armchair critics would lead us to believe is warranted. Some analysts have even begun to wonder whether the old tropes about Microsoft as closed and rival Google as open are as applicable today as they used to be.

Still, we wonder whether releasing technical documentation about existing products is really a move towards data portability. It could be framed as another step to keep Microsoft, and its data protocols, in the center of the market. That's where the company is right now, though, and the documentation being released does seem to allow 3rd party application developers a way to extend a hand to Microsoft customers in order to guide them out into the larger online ecosystem.

This documentation may be necessary for Microsoft to play at all in the future of more usable applications. Opening up programmatic access to Microsoft user data is either a brave or necessary step to take.

We also wonder how Microsoft's data openness initiatives will relate to Live Mesh, the latest contender for the "future of Microsoft" crown.

We look forward to reading more discussion about today's announcement from the development community interested in leveraging Microsoft technical documentation.

Google Analytics Industry Benchmarking will let users opt-in to share and have access to aggregate traffic info for websites in their industry vertical and at other points in their supply chain. (See sample screenshot below.)

Online invoicing service FreshBooks has been doing the same kind of thing for individual contractors for some time ("other consultants in your field are getting their invoices paid on average 2 weeks faster than you are"). Personal finance service Mint compares your spending habits to those of other users, NetWorthIQ uses aggregate financial data for wealth benchmarks and Yahoo!'s MyBlogLog displays aggregate traffic trends for users with similar web browsing interests.

These kinds of data driven value add are enabled in most cases by the network effect of a successful app but also by the world of web services. If recommendation engines are often the result of aggregate information analyzed and pointed at an individual, then industry benchmarks may be the flipside - aggregate information aimed at organizations.

Just add data portability to change the game

The new Google Analytics Benchmarks are a peek into an exciting future and a further example of how data portability could yield even further innovation. Today a huge business like Google can best scale these kinds of data sets in-house, but imagine a future when secure data portability is a reality.

If users could port their commercial or behavioral data from service to service, then analysis of significant aggregate data could take on forms limited only by an innovator's imagination and ability to persuade users to bring their data to the party. That kind of value add could become the core of any number of services in the future. It's very exciting.

Standards based data portability is clearly not a requirement for startups to be able to quickly scale services based on analysis of anonymous aggregate data, but it would be a game changer by making this kind of innovation much, much easier. For now we'll have to enjoy innovation in the big data silos and imagine the future when this kind of access to data is blown wide open for vendors.

Google made data portability a lot easier for Blogger users a month ago and with this announcement it appears they are offering easier portability solutions to WordPress, Movable Type, and LiveJournal users as well.

Google has also released templates for hosting the conversions on Google App Engine.

Take a look at the examples hosted on Google App Engine:

• Blogger to WordPress
• WordPress to Blogger
• LiveJournal to Blogger

But beware the caveat noted in the readme file:

"There is a limit to the size of a downloaded file on appspot.com of 1 MB of data. Thus, these hosted applications should only be used for reference or for the conversion of small blog export files."

If you're interested in getting involved with the project, take a look at the source code or join the discussion group here.

That's all well and good but when does the rubber hit the road? Where's the beef and what are we waiting for?

I'm really impressed. The past week may have been more talk and hype than anything else - but talk plays an important roll in building pressure for change. Major vendors have come to the table, now advocates of change everywhere have one more useful tool in this video to make sure that the public doesn't forget about the conversation that's begun.

Though it appears that Data Portability has a long road ahead of it and that major vendors are unlikely to open up access to their users' data, in fact openness has some important competitive advantages. The open and integrated vendor has far greater network effect and scale of access to data for their own purposes than the data hording vendor. The biggest challenge may be building a new social contract to protect customer privacy and control in this exciting new era of portability and personalization. You can join that conversation at DataPortability.org and elsewhere.

Michael Pick has chosen the easy-on-the eyes player from Vimeo to embed his video, the code to repost the video elsewhere is available with just a click or two from inside the player here.

Much like the original premise of Ning, Social Beans simplifies the creation of community websites.  However, since it is a portable format, a Social Beans site is not locked in to a single provider. In addition to the Grou.ps platform, the 0.1 version works with MediaWiki and WordPress. A Drupal plugin is also expected for October 2009. 

At this point, Social Beans is extremely experimental and while it's an interesting concept, the group's fate lies in 2 simple questions: Is it an easy enough template for non-technical users to adopt it? And perhaps more importantly, will developers build engines to run it? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below.

Attention data, and its cousin sales data, is very important for companies because it allows them to personalize services to specific users. By looking at your past purchases, Amazon can make recommendations about new products you might like. By looking at what you've listened to, Last.fm and make recommendations about new musicians you might enjoy. Netflix can do the same with movie rentals, Facebook can do it with advertisements, Digg will soon do it with news, etc. But the question is: who owns that data?

"Intuitively, the information belongs to the consumer, but when we look into the details, things become less clear. We explicitly choose to use Amazon, to click and to buy things there," wrote Alex Iskold in August. "Everything we do is a two way street, since Amazon provides a service and we transact with it, it seems that they should have a right to the data as well."

Even today, on this blog, we made a call for a company to open data to users. Sarah Perez called out Facebook for their timid foray into lifestreaming that doesn't allow users to export their data out of the service. And she's right, of course. Facebook's new mini-feed service would be ten times more powerful and useful to users if it didn't just aggregate outside and on site data (which Facebook will undoubtedly mine for ad targeting purposes), but also let users take it back out.

However, does Facebook have an obligation to allow the portability of all user data on the site? Even if they didn't support data portability, whose data is it? Users generated it, but voluntarily (i.e., no one forces you to put any information on Facebook), so do those users have a right to demand it back?

Real World Data Portability

But even while the debate rages online about whether sites should be required to give users access to their data, there is a whole wealth of attention data that we're creating offline as well. Should we have access to that, too? What about every movie we've rented from Blockbuster? Every book we've checked out of the library? Our purchasing habits at Costco? How often and where we fill up our gas tanks? Even where our GPS systems take us or from where we're making cellular phone calls, to whom, and for how long are potentially trackable pieces of data.

Every time I make a purchase at my local CVS pharmacy, I swipe a discount card. I do it because I get coupons back for things I purchase, and CVS can tailor those coupons to me because it knows my purchasing habits. Should I be able to have access to that sales data as well? Should CVS let me bring my sales history to Walgreens and see what coupons Walgreens gives me? Of course, that option doesn't exist right now at either CVS or Walgreens -- but increasingly it does exist online, because we asked for it. So why not offline?

There is a ton of offline attention and sales data out there. If we're demanding access to that information online, shouldn't we ask for it offline as well?

Conclusion

The answer, in my opinion, is yes: we should be asking for it. But companies should be under no obligation to part with it -- offline or online. It is certainly a great bonus when a company gives you comprehensive access to your attention data in an easily exportable format. That has a lot of advantages for the consumer, and is probably a good idea long term for many companies as well. But our dealings with the services that collect this information are generally opt in. That is, if we don't want them collecting our data, we should simply walk away.

What do you think? Does real world data portability have any merit? Do you know of any "offline" companies that offer customers access to that sort of information already?

This week's topic is Data Portability, the ongoing campaign for open data across the Web. We have an amazing group of Data Portability leaders lined up for this call: Chris Saad (Co-founder, DataPortability.org), Daniela Barbosa (Chair, DataPortability.org), Eran Hammer-Lahav (Open Standards Evangelist, Yahoo), and Angus Logan (Technical Product Manager for Windows Live Platform, Microsoft).

Before the call starts, we're interested in what questions you have for the panelists. Please leave a comment on this post and one of the RWW crew on the call (Sean, Marshall and myself) will do our best to ask your question.

UPDATE: the show is now finished, here is the audio:

Download MP3

Instead, he says, OpenSocial's goal is to standardize widget development. According to Canter, many of the social networks that have signed on to OpenSocial never intended to open their network and allows users to transport data, regardless of whether that was part of Google's plans. Rather, networks wanted access to Google's OpenSocial gadgets (their word for widgets) in an attempt to strike back against Facebook's successful platform.

This is something Marshall Kirkpatrick picked up on shortly after Google announced OpenSocial. "As some people have told me tonight, it may have been more accurate to call this 'OpenWidget' - though the press wouldn't have been as good. We've been waiting for data and identity portability - is this all we get?" he wondered in November.

And if Google is really just trying to standardize widget development, are they the ones we want at the helm? Snipperoo's Ivan Pope argues that "we'd be better off working from the ground up rather than getting suckered by a Google et al inspired bit of marketing flammery." I'm inclined to agree. Other than the seeming lack of data portability as part of the OpenSocial initiative, one of the other chief concerns that our own Marshall Kirkpatrick talked about was whether Google was exercising leadership or control.

"Still remaining is the question of Google's control over the standards creation process. It's not possible that one of the largest companies in the US and the largest in this consortium would act entirely out of concern for the world at large," he wrote.

So if OpenSocial is really not about data portability and interoperability between networks (except as far as widget creation is concerned), we'll have to look elsewhere for that. But that's not to say that OpenSocial is a total wash -- widget standardization isn't such a bad idea. As we wrote in November, there are plenty of winners when OpenSocial is adopted. "The winners of OpenSocial are Google (who now has hooks into a large number of social networking sites that reach hundreds of millions of people -- whom Google surely hopes will one day be viewing Google ads), users (who now have access to social apps on networks that previously didn't have developer APIs), app developers," we said.

The question is, do we want Google to be leading the way in widget standardization? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below.