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Open source giant Red Hat sent a Cease and Desist letter to the DataPortability.org group today, the group says, demanding the removal of the DP logo from the group's website.

Red Hat alleges that the infinity sign on the blue suitcase of DataPortability.org and the green and white infinity sign at the top of the site are "identical to the Fedora Infinity design logo owned by Red Hat."

I'm listening now to a telephone press conference with top Microsoft execs about the company's new strategy shift towards Data Portability and Interoperability for their high volume products like Windows and Office. Ray Ozzie says it is opening up the same APIs that internal developers use out into the public at large. Has Google made announcements like this? Believe it or not, Microsoft may be putting a stake in the ground that's ahead of Google on openness and other important directions for the future. Details from the call dampened my enthusiasm a bit but the announcement is notable none the less.

Our third daily Comments Competition winner is rick gregory, for his comment on our post Facebook Makes it Easier to Delete Your Account, Sort Of. Congratulations rick, you've won a $30 Amazon voucher, courtesy of our competition sponsors AdaptiveBlue and their Amazon WishList Widget. rick claimed that despite all the talk of data portability from bigcos like Facebook, it is merely lip service. He wrote:

Nonprofit tech analysts Idealware released a collection of resources today that anyone can use to evaluate APIs under consideration. Titled “Getting Your Systems Talking: A Framework to Evaluate APIs and Data Exchange Features,” the guide at its core is a worksheet that walks you through more than 30 different technical questions you should ask about any new data exchange technology you're evaluating. It's free to download.

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.

We've been writing a lot about data portability here lately, and specifically the DataPortability.org Work Group. High level members of Google and Facebook staff joined the group a week ago yesterday, key people from LinkedIn, SixApart, Flickr and Twitter joined two days after that, the new Mozilla CEO told us last night that his organization is looking closely and will likely join the group.

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

Sean Ammirati posted a 20 minute podcast interview and transcript with new Mozilla CEO John Lilly tonight and Lilly has some interesting things to share about the future of the organization. Data Portability, the forthcoming version of Firefox (Firefox 3, available in beta now), mobile Firefox and the Mozilla Weave "cloud computing for the browser" project are among the topics the two discuss.

Recent performance would suggest: be just like Twitter. Well, of course Jaiku is going to be like Twitter -- they're very similar services. But I'm not sure if Google meant for Jaiku to be so much like Twitter, complete with a bunch of downtime and errors. I'm kidding, but seriously, what does Google have in store for Jaiku? Since acquiring the service three months ago, we hadn't heard a peep about the service from either company. Until yesterday when Jaiku co-founder Jyri Engeström posted an update on the company's blog.

The DataPortability Workgroup announced this morning that representatives from both Google and Facebook are joining its ranks. The group is working on a variety of projects to foster an era of Data Portability - where users can take their data from the websites they use to reuse elsewhere and where vendors can leverage safe cross-site data exchange for a whole new level of innovation. Good bye customer lock-in, hello to new privacy challenges. If things go right, today could be a very important day in the history of the internet.

Mozilla today announced Weave, a new web platform that will store users' browser metadata in a cloud environment for access anywhere. Weave is a "framework for services integration" that will, according to Mozilla, "focus on finding ways to enhance the Firefox user experience, increase user control over personal information, and provide new opportunities for developers to build innovative online experiences."