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After 18 months of negotiation, the Open Web Foundation, a group made up of 106 employees of Yahoo, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, some small startups and their lawyers, today released a legal document template for licensing open web technology specifications. The result could be greatly accelerated time-to-market for new technologies developed on top of these specifications and more awesomeness, sooner, for web consumers.

Standardized legal documents for technical specifications may not seem like the sexiest thing in the the world - but this is actually pretty exciting news. Developments like this could be a key part of the foundation that online service providers need to move forward on a long list of great ideas for ways to serve their users.

GMail is rolling out a new feature to some users that makes it easy to import contacts and archived emails from other email accounts, with other providers, into your Gmail account. The feature is powered by a 3rd party service called TrueSwitch and it really is a breeze. The feature was announced this Spring but the roll out has been slow and many users are seeing it for the first time today. Some still don't see it.

Users are required to give TrueSwitch (through a Gmail interface) the username and password for the old account, then import can take a few hours or days. I pulled in contacts from an old Hotmail account and am now waiting to have them arrive in my Gmail contacts list.

With no fanfare or as much as an official announcement, Google has taken an important step in making users' Google Docs more open and portable.

As of today, several bloggers have reported seeing this new feature, which allows users to grab all their Google Docs and batch export them as a zip file. Files can be exported in a number of formats, including Microsoft Office and Open Office formats. Users can also choose to export only certain types of docs, e.g., spreadsheets and slide decks only.

A two-year old project by Google engineers working across departments to enable users to remove their data from Google services has been opened to the public in the form of a website with import and export instructions for Google services the team has helped "liberate".

Called the Data Liberation Front, the project team said in a Google blog post today that it has "liberated" more than half of the major Google services. "In the upcoming months," writes project lead Brian Fitzpatrick, "we also plan to liberate Google Sites and Google Docs (batch-export)."

You've seen the calls for open identity standards and data portability. Well, Social Beans aims to create standardized "skeleton portability" across social media publishing platforms. What is "skeleton portability"? According to co-founder Emre Sokullu, "Comments, forums, wikis, blogs, rating systems, tagging, sharing and bookmarking are all common social features of today's networking sites". Despite the fact that these are all common denominators of the web, developers continue to hack together their own proprietary implementations. Says Sokullu, "Social Beans aims to standardize a syntax around common social features including users, profiles, avatars, roles and news feeds." For developers, it's a pact for "development portability" or the agreement to follow the same rules for compilers.

Nick Givotovsky, a Connecticut based internet consultant and long time contributor to the digital identity community, died in an accident at his home on Friday at the age of 44. Givotovsky was an active member of the Data Portability Working Group, was a regular attendee of the Internet Identity Workshops and was Steward for the Identity Futures group in Identity Commons. He is recognized by both communities as a valued, respected and well liked contributor to many important efforts.

Author and consultant Doc Searls writes in a post memorializing Givotovsky that "Every encounter with Nick was engaging and mind-sharpening." London entrepreneur, Ian Henderson, offers the following quote from Givotovsky, exemplifying his contribution to the digital rights conversation.

Last Friday was a hot day in Sebastopol, California. Eran Hammer-Lahav rolled into town hours after finding out that there was a security hole in his pet project for the last few months, a new way to use Twitter to log in to third party sites using the OAuth protocol instead of user names and passwords. Working as the Open Web Evangelist at Yahoo, Hammer-Lahav was relieved to have been told about the hole so he could help fix it. When he arrived in Sebastopol at a small event of industry leaders called Social Web FOO Camp, he talked with friends and colleagues about it.

At some point in conversation Hammer-Lahav realized that the problem went far beyond the Twitter implementation. The OAuth protocol had an inherent vulnerability; big companies like Google, Netflix and Yahoo had implemented OAuth and scores of tiny startups had too.

Google has announced that the company now offers a secure way for third party websites to access any user's list of friends, with their permission, and based on a proposed new industry standard. No more giving away your GMail password and then having random services you want to try go into your account and scrape the information there.

Called Portable Contacts, the technical spec offers a standard, interoperable way for social networks to serve up your friends lists to anyone you give permission to access them. This should allow application developers to innovate on top of your social connections much more efficiently.

You can log in to comment here on ReadWriteWeb with an OpenID, via Facebook Connect or through various other methods. Imagine if you could make "friend" connections with other commenters on our site. That relationship wouldn't be reflected back into the OpenID or Facebook account that you then take to other sites.

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.

Two days into the new Presidential administration, Barack Obama issued a memo calling on the still unfilled new office of Chief Technology Officer to make a list of recommendations for an Open Government Directive. The recommendations are due within 120 days of that memo, which called for "a system of transparency, public participation, and collaboration." What would you like to see on the list of recommendations?

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.

Long time innovator Marc Canter has made a proposal for a system to let users integrate all their social networks from around the web into one central dashboard. He calls it the DiSO Dashboard.

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.

Do you think that open standards, data portability and questions of online identity are important? We do; we think these issues are the foundation upon which many of the most exciting and important online innovations are being built.

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.

Just about half a year ago, Google announced a limited beta of Friend Connect, which allows site owners to display OpenSocial based gadgets on their sites and site visitors to sign in to these social gadgets with their OpenID, AIM, Yahoo, or Google accounts.

Amit Agarwal has been keeping a close eye on Friend Connect since it was announced and he assumes that the service could go live pretty soon. Just last week, Google published a new YouTube video geared towards users and now the support site for Friend Connect is available as well.

Wesabe and the UK Telegraph Think You Might

Online money management service Wesabe and the UK newspaper giant The Telegraph have entered a partnership to offer co-branded tools on the Telegraph website. It's a daring move, we can't help but admire it. We can't help but wonder how users will feel about it too, though.

MySpace launched "Profile version 2.0" late last night and a number of the changes are quite significant. The two biggest in our minds are the ability to set different privacy controls for different parts of a user's profile and the near complete adherence to W3C HTML standards.

As MySpace develops, so develop the next generation of mainstream web users and thus the web at large. Whether you're a MySpace user or not, it's worthwhile to keep an eye on what the company is doing - especially in terms of user experience.

Guess which US state has Flickr users most likely to post their photos with privacy restrictions turned on? Utah. Think you can guess relative emphasis put on privacy by Flickr users in South America vs. South East Asia? How about Hawaii vs. Alaska? (That one might surprise you!)

I'm here at a small meeting of the Yahoo Product Advisory Council and while most of what's being discussed today has been put under Non Disclosure Agreement, the presentation by the Yahoo! Research Team can be blogged about and includes at least one really interesting visual about Flickr privacy levels around the world.

"Imagine what your cell phone could know [about you]," pondered Sandro Hawke (Semantic Web Developer, W3C), at the Web 3.0 Conference and Expo in Santa Clara, CA this week.

"It hears everything that's going on around you; it knows where you are, it knows the motion of your body, it sees what's in front of it, it knows your contacts, and it hears your phone calls". Imagine the possibilities.

If cookies were the multi-billion dollar magic for much of the web's first iteration, tiny technologies to power conversation could play a similar role in the future of business online. More fun than that, though, is the innovation we hope to see in the technology of conversation.

Comment and review plug-in suite JS-Kit announced today a new round of funding and the hire as an adviser of one of the web's most forward looking innovators, Data Portability Working Group co-founder Chris Saad. Though JS-Kit has a funny name, the company has a big installed base. In addition to being very easy to install, it recently partnered with red-hot content sharing service ShareThis and acquired the early market leader in plug-and-play commenting, Haloscan. What does the future look like for JS-Kit and how might that relate to the web at large? We asked Chris Saad for his thoughts this morning.

The Mozilla Foundation announced this morning that it has hired Dion Almaer and Ben Galbraith, co-founders of Ajaxian and the Ajax Experience, to run a new Developer Tools Lab aimed to make Open Web development easier and more powerful. The term Open Web refers to a paradigm in which data and users can move easily from one standards-based application to the next, without being hindered by proprietary technology or vendors hording user data.

Note-taking and Optical Character Recognition service Evernote may not have a whole lot of users yet, but the users it does have absolutely love it. There's a whole lot more to love, and more reasons to use Evernote, with a slew of announcements the company made today.

Freshly announced were support for automation through scripting, full XML data imports and exports and the much anticipated Application Programming Interface (API) that will let 3rd parties integrate Evernote into their applications.