This commitment to identity integration, coupled with Chrome's move to cloud-based bookmarking, point to the growth of the borderless social web experience - an experience that has been a long time coming. For years we've asked for social network portability and the freedom to manage our own online relationships. With this rising trend towards browser-based service integration and cloud-based data storage, we're one step closer to realizing that dream.

Facebook, on the other hand, has already captured the collective mind share of the mainstream and can take the good ideas set forth by early adopter hits and repackage them in ways that their users are more apt to consume.

A study (PDF) by Yahoo! and Ipsos Insight in 2005, found that at the time only 4% of Internet users had knowingly used RSS, but another 27% used it via start pages like MyYahoo! without being aware of what it was. I'm willing to bet that those numbers have improved, but I am also willing to bet that a similarly low percentage of Facebook users would know what a lifestream was -- even though they use one every day with the Facebook Mini-Feed.

Don't Look Now, But Facebook is Eating Your Lunch

Facebook has status updates that you can update via SMS (watch out Twitter), they have a news feed that now accepts 12 outside inputs (watch out FriendFeed), they have the biggest photo sharing site on the web (watch out Flickr), they have a built in chat application (watch out Meebo). These features were all added as an after thought. Facebook has taken the most buzzed about early adopter-targeted applications, and turned them into features for the mainstream.

But Facebook keeps my data locked up, you might say. FriendFeed gives me an RSS feed of my activity stream, Twitter does the same thing, and both sites have an API. Those are good points, but not for the average web user, who will more often than not respond with, "Who cares?" or "I don't know what the words you just said mean..."

It might be ironic that Facebook is porting data in from outside services, but not making it easy for users to go the other way with data created inside Facebook. But for most users, that thought probably doesn't ever occur. Most users don't care what's under the hood, they just care that a service does what they want or expect it to. Mainstream users aren't asking Facebook for data portability. That their status updates have to stay in Facebook doesn't matter.

In 2006, Marc Canter said, "Users do care [about data portability] if for no other reason than they're lazy and they don't (want) to have to create all those relationships and upload their photos -- all over again." I think, though, that he's actually not right. My unscientific survey of one average web user tonight led me to believe that mainstream users don't care about the things that early adopters do. Even after explaining what data portability was and its benefits, the response I got was, "So what? In the past 5 years I've used 3 social networks -- Friendster, MySpace, and Facebook. I change services so infrequently, and the sign up process is so easy, taking my data with me doesn't seem like something I really need."

My guess is that mainstream users, by and large, are fine with their data staying in one place.

Of course that's also not the point. Data portability is important, and some day, because early adopters pushed for it, mainstream users won't say, "So what?" they'll say, "It's really cool that all my Facebook contacts are automatically in Yahoo! Mail," all the while still not really being aware of the concepts behind data portability. In the meantime, though, Facebook is taking the ideas that early adopters love, and co-opting them into features that mainstream users will learn to love, without mucking about with all those things that early adopters demand. (That's the point.)

Conclusion

I'm going to paraphrase something my colleague Sarah Perez said to me in a conversation discussing this post a couple of days ago. Facebook seems to have been built to let the entirety of web 2.0 flow into it. News feed (FriendFeed), status (Twitter), platform (web 2.0 apps/services), etc., Facebook is all about taking web 2.0 to the average, casual web user.

Will FriendFeed and Twitter go mainstream? You bet. But it will very likely be as features on Facebook. A commenter on our post yesterday about Facebook's new profile design noticed that the new design makes Facebook feel like an operating system. That's an astute observation and it seems to be where Facebook wants to go. Web 2.0 will flow through Facebook, and Facebook will become the mainstream everything. Will users stand for it? Early adopters certainly won't unless Facebook makes it easy to get out what we put in, but mainstream users might just let it happen (and probably won't really realize that it is happening).

The DataPortability project taps into the strong conviction, engendered by the do-it-yourself nature of the web 2.0 movement, that individuals should "have control over their data by determining how they can use it and who can use it". This extends to an inherent belief that that it has not been a lack of effective technology that has held back this new culture of open data sharing, but rather business models that have been over-reliant on laying a proprietary claim to some portion of that data.

Taste sharing is a DataPortability use case

We express our online tastes any time we make a choice between the various alternatives available to us. Some of our choices may be characterized by the number of times we select each option when repeatedly confronted with the same choice - for example the number of songs of each genre we play when we select music. Other choices may be expressed subjectively, such as assigning one to five stars to movies we watch, when we are asked to rate our preferences for the different alternatives. In yet other cases, we may in effect be giving estimates for the number of times we would expect to select each alternative, such as when we are asked if we are likely to buy a product or vote for something. Virtually any online experience we have includes one or more instances in which we make conscious choices reflecting our preferences.

For the more theoretically inclined amongst us, we can view a choice as somewhat analogous to a random experiment and our relative preferences as measures of the different possible outcomes of the experiment. The collection of such experiments that we participate in as a matter of course in our web experiences paints a vivid picture of our taste. For the more pragmatic: each time we make choices, we generate data which empirically describes our preferences. This is data that can be encapsulated and shared just like any other picture, blog post, video, or other piece of online content that we create; and which the DataPortability project is focused on.

A few ideas for open taste sharing

As a DataPortability use case, open taste sharing embodies and embraces the culture shift that the Web 2.0 movement represents. With regard to data ownership, the DataPortability concept has even more succinct expression: our tastes should be ours to share, or not. This puts the user in control of their online experience, so they can set the boundaries of how much they want to share and with whom. Similarly, there is no need to invent new or proprietary technologies to simply identify, encapsulate, and share taste-related data.

A little thought by websites about how to identify and summarize our relative preferences on their site is enough to do the job - along with OpenID, OAuth, and a little task-specific XML for markup. However clearly this kind of data sharing also raises new privacy concerns, which is part of the work-in-progress for the entire DataPortability project.

Image by MyStrands

Perhaps the most interesting challenge lies in educating businesses to thoroughly and thoughtfully examine their current ideas about user data, so they can better understand and enthusiastically embrace The Web 2.0 Golden Rule: "Do for other web experiences providers as they would do for you - under our control as the owners of our taste data - and the blessings of networks effects for taste data shall be yours."

This is a guest post by Dr. Rick Hangartner, MyStrands Chief Scientist. You can follow Dr. Hangartner on the MyStrands blog.

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

Fortunately, the newest board members are buying the beer for meetings into the indefinite future; while a seat in the majority "community member" section of the board is free - corporations wanting to make up a minority part of the board have to make a financial donation to the foundation for the position.

For users, OpenID means much easier account creation, better personalization, privacy and security when trying out new web sites. It makes for a greatly improved user experience. For websites and other companies, OpenID means more and happier users and potentially greater access to information about those users.

There's a whole lot of momentum right now for OpenID. In January Yahoo! increased the number of OpenID enabled user accounts by orders of magnitude, the long-awaited OpenID 2.0 spec was just recently finalized and the entire Data Portability paradigm is moving into the public consciousness quickly.

All of that said, big vendors have a lot of short term interest in controlling identity silos. It won't be easy to get their long term interests in openness to prevail. Fortunately, they are participating but are in the minority on the OpenID Foundation board.

We wrote about the Foundation chair Scott Kveton's new day job, at a particularly interesting OpenID vendor called Vidoop, earlier this week. There are many, many places you can get an OpenID and there are significant differences in advanced feature sets. To get a good look at the range of options and details beyond mere simple one-way authentication check out the vendor comparison at SpreadOpenID.org. If issues like these are of interest, check out the ReadWriteWeb Toolkit for tracking top technology themes of 2008, including Data Portability and OpenID.

The Social Graph API uses the same algorithms at play in Google's search engine to discover how people are connected across the Internet. In fact, it only uses publicly available data -- if it's not on Google, the API won't be able to find it -- which Google says puts users in control of their own data since anything they don't like showing up, they can change at the source level.

The API works by searching for connections between people based on how people are linked on social networks and via publicly available profiles and pages -- i.e., if Marshall Kirkpatrick and I linked to each other on our personal blogs, or if we followed each other on Twitter, the Social Graph API might consider us friends because we have a strong connection. So, if I then sign up for a new social service, I can feed it links to my social presence elsewhere (like my blog or Twitter profile) and it will analyze those public connections and suggest to me that maybe I should be friends with Marshall on this new service because it looks like I'm friends with him elsewhere.

I spoke this morning to Google Developer Advocate Kevin Marks (whom we interviewed in December), and he showed me a demo using his blog as an example that shows how strong each of his various online presence points are connected. I.e., how his blog is connected to his Twitter account is connected to his Flickr page, etc.

As more and more users are beginning to suffer the effects of "social networking fatigue," anything that helps automate and make easier the process of adding your existing connections to a new network is a useful tool. The Social Graph API could be an important part of the data portability movement in that it allows users to find and evaluate their public social connections and take control of that information.

Google has set up a Social Graph API group as well as provided developer documentation.

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.

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.

It's been almost a year, though, since Digg announced that it would support OpenID and there's been no tangible movement on the protocol yet. None the less, it is encouraging to read that the company is looking to implement things like Attention Profile Markup Language (APML) and Open Authentication (oAuth.) Those are cool.

Additional Resources of Interest

• DataPortability.org has begun issuing monthly progress reports detailing the work they are doing. It's an attempt to respond to criticism that it's all just talk - sounds like a good idea.


• Scott Kveton, chair of the OpenID Foundation did a wonderful podcast interview with Phil Windley earlier this month about OpenID and data portability in general. Whether you're familiar with these issues already or not there's lots to learn in that interview.


• Niall Kennedy made a very good post last week titled Data Portability, Authentication, and Authorization that describes best practices in getting access to user data from one site to another. Hint: it's not about asking people for their email user name and password! I've been referencing that post a lot lately in conversations.


• Interested in only part of these discussions? The DataPortability.org Google Group is quite active, too much so for many companies only partially engaged in these issues. Much better you be partially engaged than not at all. If you'd like - here's some RSS feeds for that discussion filtered down to some particular topics. Feel free to subscribe to them.

  Filtered DataPortability Google Group and shared items regarding:

  Mobile
  http://feeds.feedburner.com/DataportabilityOnMobile

  Privacy
  http://feeds.feedburner.com/DataportabilityOnPrivacy

  Social Networking
  http://feeds.feedburner.com/DataportabilityOnSocialNetworking

  Filtering done via FeedDigest, one of many services online that can filter feeds. I hope you find the above resources useful.

  ]]>Discuss]]> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/digg_joins_dataportability_wor.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/digg_joins_dataportability_wor.php data portability Tue, 29 Jan 2008 11:37:10 -0800 Marshall Kirkpatrick 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.

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  ]]> The group made headlines earlier this month when key individuals from Google and Facebook joined. We at ReadWriteWeb believe that data portability will be one of the defining issues of 2008 and included resources concerning the subject in our 2008 Toolkit.

  Microsoft's joining the group is an event of sufficiently complex historical meaning that I'm hesitant to try and interpret it here. Microsoft has both been the ultimate example of lock-in and also an important force behind other open standards efforts on the web, including OpenID. Though no fan of Microsoft, I am consistently excited about what the Live team in particular does. I'll look for analysis of this and future news about implementation at Live from my favorite source on the topic, LiveSide.

  Where's the beef so far?

  One of the most frequent criticisms the working group has faced in its short history is that it is all talk and no action. I asked founder and Chairman Chris Saad about this critique and he said the following:
  "There's tonnes of beef - all the [contributing] standards groups have done excellent work already. We're just helping the mainstream catch up."

  Saad also pointed to the group's timeline, titled A list of significant events leading to a Data Portability enabled Internet.

  You can expect a lot more discussion and news to come from these quarters in the coming months.
  

  
  
  DataPortability - Connect, Control, Share, Remix from Smashcut Media on Vimeo.
  ]]>Discuss]]> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/microsoft_joining_dataportabil.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/microsoft_joining_dataportabil.php data portability Wed, 23 Jan 2008 06:40:53 -0800 Marshall Kirkpatrick 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.

  ]]>Sponsor
  
  ]]> Web News: CES

  This week CES, the famous consumer electronics tradeshow, was held in Las Vegas. As we do every year, ReadWriteWeb covered the big Web Technology announcements made at CES.

  One of the highlights was the keynote of Bill Gates (his last at CES), which is traditionally a showcase of the latest in Microsoft technology. This year there were a slew of products and partnerships announced, including a deal with NBC on an Olympics '08 website built with Silverlight technology. Overall Gates and co's presentation was less futuristic vision this year; and more about beta products and what's coming in 2008. In other words, it was much less about Internet-connected fridges, and more about what you can do now on your Xbox 360. Read our full review to find out where Microsoft is headed on the Web in 2008.

  In related news, this week Microsoft announced a $1.2 billion takeover offer for Norwegian enterprise search company Fast Search and Transfer.

  Yahoo also were active at CES. Yahoo! announced last Sunday night that it will be turning its mobile service, Yahoo! Go, into an open platform for 3rd party developers. Unlike Google's Android OS, the Yahoo! Go platform will work on more than 250 mobile devices that Go already works on. The following day Yahoo! co-founder and CEO Jerry Yang was on stage at CES, showing a fascinating glimpse into the future of Yahoo. Yang outlined a product strategy that takes the simplicity and all-in-one portal approach that Yahoo! is famous for - and pushes it into the digital life arena by utilizing email, social networking, mobile and widgets. In Yang's words, Yahoo! aims to be the "most essential starting point for your life".

  Also see Marshall's post about Flickr enabling OpenID.

  Our network blog last100 had a great round-up of the Internet TV announcements at CES. Steve O'Hear saw a lot of products that bridge the gap between the PC and TV, or bring Internet content directly to a television. Highlights included the SlingCatcher (Sling Media), D-Link’s newly launched PC-on-TV Player, TiVo Desktop 2.6 (TiVo), and Internet-connected TVs from Sharp, Samsung and Panasonic.

  Other Web News: Google and Facebook join DataPortability Workgroup

  We broke the story this week that Google and Facebook had joined the Portability Workgroup. 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, this announcement may turn out to be a very important one in the history of the internet.

  Later in the week, The Data Portability Working Group announced that key people from LinkedIn, Flickr, SixApart and Twitter are joining the group too.

  Trends

  15 Questions for an Early Facebook User

  Alex Iskold's sister Julia was one of the first users of Facebook. She is now a senior at the Newhouse School of Communications at Syracuse University and will be graduating in May. He thought it would be interesting to interview her about the Facebook and her experiences with it over the years. In this post is the revealing 15 question interview.

  Related: Reported Upcoming Facebook Features: Good, Obvious, Confusing and Hide Facebook Apps: Official Tool Coming Soon

  The Obama Bump Felt on Facebook

  Ah, what a difference a caucus makes. In November, when ABC and Facebook announced their partnership for US political coverage we, like many other tech pundits, expressed skepticism. We noted that polls on the Facebook politics section were drawing just around 1,000 participants -- "a microscopic number" compared to the 17 million US members of voting age on the site (now over 18 million). But just over a month later, things seem to have turned around completely.

  Wizzard Media: 1 Billion Downloads in 2007, Podcasting Far from Dead

  Wizzard Media, owners of the Libsyn, Switchpod and Blast Podcast networks, announced that it passed the 1 billion download mark in 2007. While online media consumption numbers are notoriously hard to verify, Wizzard's have some serious merit. They are ten times what several competitors claimed earlier this month.

  SEE MORE WEB TRENDS COVERAGE IN OUR TRENDS CATEGORY

  Web Products

  Semantic Web: What Is The Killer App?

  The Semantic Web has been in the making for some time and people think it is nearing maturity. We have written about this trend extensively, with our two most notable posts being an analysis of the challenges of the classic bottom-up approach and the promise of the new top-down one. Regardless of how the Semantic Web will come about, for it to flourish it needs to hit the mainstream. There is no way that consumers will appreciate the elegance and mathematical soundness of RDF and OWL. People don't care about math, they care about utility and even more, about fun. What the Semantic Web needs, then, is a killer app.

  ABC's Web Adventure for Lost - The Future of Entertainment

  It begins with billboards spotted in exotic places like Knoxville, Tennessee and Ames, Iowa and posted online by curious Lost fans. The billboards advertise a URL, "FlyOceanicAir.com." Upon visiting the website, you are sucked into an adventure involving multiple websites, video diaries, photos with text hidden among the pixels, clue hunts, and strategy games. You can even call a toll-free phone number and get progress updates about the search for missing Oceanic Flight 815. Interesting characters and mysteries keep web players engaged and new content is posted at seemingly random intervals, forcing frequent check-ins to see if there's anything new.

  So begins Lost's second Alternate Reality Game, which new RWW author Sarah Perez investigated...

  The Many Faces of Hulu

  Part of Hulu's strategy is to not only be a destination, but also a hub for the distribution of content from NBC Universal and News Corp. They do this in two ways: 1. by letting ordinary users embed clips elsewhere on the web, and 2. by partnering with major media sites to deliver commercial content. The result is that consumers have a number of choices for where they can view the content on Hulu.com. In this post we took a look at a handful of Hulu-powered sites, including Hulu itself.

  NewsGator Sets RSS Readers Free - Will Desktop Readers Make a Comeback?

  NewsGator, which offers the most complete end-to-end suite of RSS reader tools on the market and possibly the most widely used offline readers (NetNewsWire and FeedDemon), announced that its most popular products would be set free. As in beer. According to NewsGator founder and CTO Greg Reinacker, the reason for going free is simple: "What we’re working to do is to saturate the market with our clients [...] we want our clients to become ubiquitous."

  We ran a poll based on this news, asking: What type of RSS Reader do you use the most? Here are the results:

  Web-based (e.g. Bloglines, Google Reader, Rojo) 42%
  Desktop (e.g. FeedDemon, NetNewsWire) 39%
  Email-based client (e.g. Thunderbird, Newsgator) 4%
  I subscribe to emails from individual blogs 1%
  Start page (e.g. Pageflakes, Netvibes, iGoogle) 11%
  Portal-based (e.g. MyYahoo, ThePortNetwork) 1%
  Browser (e.g. Firefox Live Bookmarks, IE, Flock) 2%
  Other (please comment) 1%

  Related: AideRSS Raises Money To Attack Information Overload

  SEE MORE WEB PRODUCTS COVERAGE IN OUR PRODUCTS CATEGORY

  Macworld Predictions

  While CES was raging in Las Vegas, many were wondering what Apple has in store for their own annual expo, Macworld, which kicks off this coming Monday. We've combed through some of the top Mac rumors sites to pick out our favorite Macworld predictions and assigned a percentage of probability to each.

  Last year it was the iPhone, two years ago it was the Intel iMac, the year before that the iPod shuffle and the Mac mini. While clearly, not every year is as exciting as the last, Apple always has something in store for us.

  Related: Poll: What Will Be Announced at Macworld?

  That's a wrap for another week! Enjoy your weekend everyone.

  ]]>Discuss]]> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/weekly_wrapup_7-11_january_2008.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/weekly_wrapup_7-11_january_2008.php Weekly Wrapups Sat, 12 Jan 2008 16:23:03 -0800 Richard MacManus 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.

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  The new additions include Steve Ganz, Senior Web Developer at LinkedIn, Matthew Rothenberg, Product Strategy and Management at Flickr, David Recordon, the point-person for all things OpenID related at SixApart, and Blain Cook, a developer at Twitter.

  Heavy Hitters

  Like the individuals from Google and Facebook who joined the working group earlier this week, these aren't random people who just happen to work at these major companies. Brad Fitzpatrick, the inventor of LiveJournal and one of the primary minds behind OpenID, the concept of the Social Graph and the Google-led OpenSocial platform, joined from Google. Benjamin Ling, who runs the entire Facebook platform, the crown jewel of the company, joined from Facebook.

  Ganz, from LinkedIn, presumably has the strong support of founder Reid Hoffman as well. Hoffman is one of the most articulate top executives you'll find regarding data portability issues. Update: Check this out, LInkedIn even posted about the Data Portability issue on their blog today - wouldn't it be great if Google did that?

  That said, all of these people have just joined a working group. Now the real work begins. History offers many examples of working groups that went nowhere. Odds are never good that big company's are going to open up and things in this world are going to get better! But we can hope, cheer and cajole.

  Along with the unconfirmed rumor that Google, IBM and Verisign are in talks to join the OpenID Foundation - today's growth of the Data Portability work group offers more hope that 2008 could be a year of substantial change regarding user control over data and privacy. Here's hoping the big guys can bring market share and experience without overwhelming the innovation and user-centric motivation of some of the smaller players in these discussions.

  ]]>Discuss]]> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/linkedin_flickr_and_sixapart_dataportability.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/linkedin_flickr_and_sixapart_dataportability.php data portability Thu, 10 Jan 2008 09:59:53 -0800 Marshall Kirkpatrick