Data Portability

Last night I was a guest on Aaron Brazell's TechnosailorTV. We spoke mainly about Twitter and other social networks over the 40-minute discussion. One of the topics I brought up is what I call the "friend suitcase". The idea is simple - a person develops friendships (real friends) over time on all of the different social networks. Whether it's MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, Pownce, Plurk, Jaiku, Driftr, Yelp, Brightkite, Toluu, etc., we've all met people we consider friends.

Once a person moves into friend status with me, I do my best to get them into my suitcase. I guess it's my form of data portability. My suitcase contains the information for my friends that is outside any social network. It typically includes email addresses, snail mail addresses, phone numbers and instant messaging accounts. Email is still the main form of contact with most people and so it's important that I can contact my friends via email when needed. Sure Twitter or Facebook is good, but email is almost 100% and the likelyhood that's going down is near zero.

With all of the talk about Twitter's potential death over the past few days, the idea of the friend suitcase becomes even more important. So many times we've said, "what happens if x dies, how will we find our friends" -- the answer is the friend suitcase. When I need to get a hold of a friend in an emergency situation, I sure don't want to see a fail whale.

Once data portability becomes the norm and users can select to share the data above, then filling my suitcase will become much easier. I don't see these exporting options becoming the norm for at least the next 12-18 months.

Do you have a suitcase? If so, what pieces of information do you store in it? If not, do you assume that your friends will find you on the next social network?

By now we’ve all read the recent data portability announcements by Google (Friend Connect), MySpace (Data Availability) and Facebook (Facebook Connect) to extend social functionality outside of their walls to any website.

Since these announcements were made I’ve been asked for my opinion about what it means to web publishers, the market and KickApps. I believe all three will be useful but the key point if you’re a publisher is to what degree do YOU want and need to own YOUR site’s audience’s’profile data and activities data. This will dictate how you use or don’t use any of the three.

At the highest level, core to every publisher is its brand, editorial content/voice and relationship with its audience. As the web becomes more social, access by the publisher to their audience’s Profile and Social Graph (audience data and activities) becomes extremely important. Having this information becomes a powerful tool that delivers deep insight into their audience, which informs editorial programming and marketing. Crucially, it plays a huge role in delivering truly targeted advertising. more »

Chris Saad, leader of the data portability Web site has posted a personal and internal note of thanks to the ever-growing community of Web users wanting more from their data. I've pasted his message below. We've written about DataPortability a good number of times before and believe that it's critical that everyone owns their data and can choose how it's used, where it's used and when it's used.

Hi Everyone,

I just wanted to write a personal note of thanks to this community. We have all commented and made statements about "Six Months Strong" or "[Insert big vendor] joins the project]," but in all the excitement I have not had a chance to share my personal thanks.

As everyone knows by now, this project started as a very small idea by a small group of individuals who wondered out loud, "Does everyone know those cool standards could fit together?" -- or "Why not create a set of best practices for implementing these standards so that all the implementations just worked" -- or "Could we prove the Web really is the ultimate social network platform?" MORE »

The super big news this afternoon is that MySpace has joined the DataPortability movement in a big way. Here's all you need to know about this announcement:

1. some of the data (photos, videos, text) stored on MySpace will be available to their friend networks which include: Yahoo!, eBay, Twitter, and Photobucket.

2. it's not really data portability, more like data sharing

3. it's live data sharing -- if you change your status from male to female, it's instantly zapped to all of the places you've shared the info. This is awesome because it makes it easier than having to remember to change it in a million social networks.

4. They will accept Facebook into their data sharing plan but Zucks gotta be the one to make the call.

SAI has notes from the live conference call and Venture Beat has detailed analysis of the announcement. Check out all of our DataPortability coverage.

Chris Saad, data portability leader sent over the following video that explains the companies that have signed up to push info in and those who have signed up to suck info out.

Social news aggregator Digg has announced several enhancements to their DataPortability support. Digg's Steve Williams provides an overview of the updates which include:

-- XFN Friends Network access - this lets other services tie-into your friends on Digg

-- hCard access - this is basically your business card - allows other machines to read your Digg profile for the juicy bits of personal info

-- They've also added RDFa, which Wikipedia explains "allows you to annotate XHTML markup with semantics."

These steps are a good move forward for DataPortability. It's not exactly how I'd define DP but it's a good step for Digg to make.

The DataPortability group has selected the new logo which they are calling a "trustmark" today. The logo contest saw 400 logo submissions reviewed by a panel of judges and voted by 4,562 people. The winner is located on the left -- not sure what to think about it at this point. It seems to show movement in and movement out which is a good thing. If you are at the Web 2.0 Expo, they will be handing out stickers with the new logo today.

Chris Saad, DataPortability group leader shared with me some additional updates as the group has reached the six-month milestone:

• Creation of the DIY (Do It Yourself Data Portability) Club
• Creating formal networks and informal outreach, such as the DataPortability Video Project and the DataPortability InMotion Prodcast Series, which invites people to describe what data portability means to them
• Published technical paper stubs for the first batch of documents

Lastly, here's the group's new tagline: DataPortability Connect.Control.Share.Remix

Web buzz tracking service BuzzLogic has announced the acquisition of Activeweave today. When I interviewed BuzzLogic, I called them the corporate Technorati (that actually works). They explain the BuzzLogic service as: BuzzLogic changes this dynamic (influence) by uniquely defining and measuring influence in social media, and by surfacing the key influencers who are shaping and defining markets, issues and reputations.

Today they are acquiring Activeweave, makers of BlogRovr which is a browser plugin that helps to identify posts you might be interested in based on your interests. I spoke with the new team last week regarding the acquisition and while they couldn't share the acquisition price, they did explain that the combined company will target, "conversational marketing." The plugin has 80,000 active users and 200,000 blogs are in the BlogRovr network.

The latest tool from BuzzLogic is conversational advertising -- that is helping companies to put advertising right where the conversation is using Google AdWords and other ad networks. We wrote about this advertising option late last year and said it's a game changer. With the Activeweave acquisition, this program should expand into even more blogs and verticals.

Both companies are based in San Francisco and the new company has 27 employees.

Update: Marshall Kirkpatrick at ReadWriteWeb has a lengthy look into DataPortability regarding the BlogRovr service.

If the topic of Data Portability has been tough to understand, Danny Ayers has created a song called, "Get Your Data Out". It's a rock song and while the words don't rhyme like the SEO Rapper, it's a pretty good song. It's catchy and the middle 90 seconds show you a variety of apps and their data portability structures (or lack of). Here's hoping that Danny sings it live at the next DP summit. Danny says that the semantic Web is the new rock and roll. Come inside to view the video.

It was about this time yesterday that we noted that RedHat went after the DataPortability workgroup for a similar logo. While the logos are not similar enough to create a claim in my opinion, the DP workgroup has taken Techcrunch's suggestion to create a user-generated logo contest. The official name is the, "DataPortability Logo Competition."

Sounds like a variety of companies have offered prizes and we will offer one-month of free advertising on either CN or HTMLCenter (winner's choice).

This could be a great way for the topic of data portability to reach past the tech bloggers/journalists. And for the designers who enter, it's an awesome way to get your name out.

And at the very least RedHat has received some very negative community buzz in the last day.

From the What The Fu** department, RedHat has sent a cease and desist (c&d for you home gamers) to the DataPortability workgroup for logo infringement. You see, RedHat uses a symbol that looks like the one to the left. The Data Portability logo is a dark D plus a light P combined to look like "infinity". You can read the entire complaint here.

My opinion: the logos look nothing alike to me.

Marshall Kirkpatrick shows a picture of a pretzel in the shape of the RedHat logo. I just went to Times Square and food cart operators were closing up due to fear of a C&D on the pretzels they sell. No one wanted to speak on camera in fear of their safety.

Former attorney and Techcrunch owner Mike Arrington notes, "The ideas are what’s important - the logo is irrelevant...Have a contest and let fans create a new logo for you." I agree with Mike and would hope that the contest would allow anyone to enter and the judging would be fair and wouldn't just pick a "friend of DP". Could be a good way to get the word out about DP past the geek bloggers.

Maybe RedHat is just pissed after today's Microsoft announcement? We've seen how pissy bloggers handle things - they attack. Maybe this is the way pissy operating systems companies handle things.

In all seriousness, c'mon RedHat, let's make more great products, not worry about a logo.