ReadWriteWeb

Google announced bookmark sync to the Chrome browser in a blog post earlier today. Chrome users can sync their bookmarks across various machines and store them alongside Google Docs. While the feature is not a new concept amongst browsers, the significance is that yet another player is storing your data in the cloud with the ability to distribute it across networks. As predicted by ReadWriteWeb and Forrester's Jeremiah Owyang, it appears that your social data is converging with the browser with potentially huge implications for data portability.

The ways young people use the internet everyday are transforming learning in ways that adults often fail to understand but represent major new opportunities that need to be taken advantage of by supportive educators. That's the conclusion of a major new study by 28 researchers over three years released today by the University of California at Berkley and the MacArthur Foundation.

Titled "Living and Learning With New Media," the study articulates the value of social networking, text messaging and other forms of new media use better than anything we've seen yet. It's a major contribution to our understanding of the new web and the way it impacts the world at large.

Whenever a new product comes out that has the early adopter set all atwitter -- like say, Twitter, for example -- there is a certain amount of discussion devoted to when or if the product will go mainstream. Sometimes we're not even sure if a new web app or service maybe already has reached the masses. A lucky few new web apps will cross the proverbial chasm into the mainstream, but most won't. Some those that don't will nonetheless see their ideas co-opted by a site that is already undeniably mainstream -- Facebook.

Fifteen or so years into the evolution of the web, we already have many of the key ideas and technologies in place to start describing and sharing personal preference information - or what we might colloquially call "taste" - in order to personalize web experiences. So, why haven't we yet seen widespread adoption of web personalization? Mostly because user expectations and online business models haven't yet evolved to the point that user-controlled, ‘open taste’ sharing is a viable option. However, the dataportability.org initiative suggests that we may have reached a turning point.

The OpenID Foundation is announcing this morning that Google, IBM, Microsoft, VeriSign and Yahoo! have taken seats as the organization's first corporate board members.

OpenID is a protocol for authenticating your identity through a single chosen provider instead of creating unique accounts at every website you use.

Google today announced the release of a new API for graphing social net connections on the web at large. The Social Graph API is a way for developers of social applications to let users easily find data on their social connections across the open web. The information the API returns can be useful in helping users locate and add their friends when starting up at a new social application.

Steve O'Hear (who edits our digital lifestyle blog last100) has an interesting post on his ZDNet blog that questions whether Google's OpenSocial initiative is at all about data portability, or if in fact it really just about widget standardization. O'Hear quotes heavily from a recent article by Marc Canter, who is a strong advocate for open standards and data portability, that ran on CNet.

Digg made a post to the company's blog this morning announcing that they are officially joining the DataPortability.org Working Group. Digg follows Facebook, Google, Microsoft and many other companies in getting on board to discuss protocols that will make it easier for users to move their data from one site to another while still protecting their privacy.

The company posted more specifics about its embrace of data standards than almost any of the other participating companies has. Read more below, plus check out some related resources that we hope you'll find useful.

Chris Saad, Chairman of the Data Portability Working Group, confirmed to me this morning that Microsoft's David Treadwell, a VP at Windows Live, will be joining the organization. Microsoft is expected to make a formal announcement in the coming days. News first leaked out via a shadowy post at Computerworld this morning.

The Working Group aims to foster standard protocols for users to port their identities, friends and digital assets from one site online to another, as they see fit. See the explanatory video at the end of this post for another explanation of the general concepts. Still another good explanation can be found in John Battelle's excellent post earlier this month on how companies should compete on quality of service more than data lock-in.

Here is a summary of the week's Web Tech action on ReadWriteWeb, the first full working week of 2008!

Highlights this week: Our coverage of CES, including Web product and strategy announcements from Microsoft and Yahoo!; Google and Facebook join DataPortability Workgroup; a review of the latest Web adventure for television show Lost; an analysis of the 'killer apps' for the Semantic Web; some new, stunning, stats from the world of podcasting; Newsgator releases its premium products for free; and predictions for next week's Macworld conference.

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.