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Curverider, the company behind the open-source social network Elgg, is launching a hosted enterprise social networking solution called Elgg.com. The product, in private beta until September, will compete directly with other social enterprise vendors such as Socialtext, Yammer, and Salesforce.com's Chatter.

Last week, Amazon Web Services announced its Import/Export service would be openly available, in order to facilitate the movement of data to and from the cloud.

The catch: it appears as though the fastest way to transfer large amounts of data is by mailing a storage device to Amazon. As Amazon itself noted when they launched the Import/Export service, "it would take over 80 days to upload just 1TB of data over a T1 connection."

Amazon Web Services announced today that their AWS Import/Export service to help move data in and out of Amazon S3 would be more widely available. The service was launched in a limited beta in May, and today opens to anyone, along with an API and a web interface so that customers can check on the status of their data transfer.

Earlier this week, Mark Zuckerberg claimed that Facebook's recent privacy changes were not nefarious, but rather an unselfish pursuit of "a concept called data portability."

As the one of the people who popularized that concept in relation to social networks, and as a founding member of the organization representing that cause, I'd like to call bullshit on that.

A single word, context, was the message in Facebook's briefing today. We liveblogged the event and are continuing to cover the aftermath. Worth noting in Mark Zuckerberg's presentation and Q&A was that it was easy to see how hard it is to gain a common context for how we view sharing. Meeting users' needs for privacy is a problem of context - what privacy means for each individual user and for the company itself - and Facebook is in a defining moment in its ability to address that.

"Facebook is not a solved problem," he said, and we agree.

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.