If I post a message on Twitter, it is instantly copied to my Friendfeed account. If I delete that twit message, it is not removed from Friendfeed. I selected to have Friendfeed read and aggregate my Twitter account so the behavior makes sense on the display side. Since Friendfeed can read and write to Twitter, can’t they just read the current status of messages?

I’ve also noticed more blogs sucking in content from Twitter and Friendfeed. It’s a smart move for the blogs because it makes for more monetizable content and can also make a blog appear more active. Some blogs appear to be scraping the content on their own, some are using comment aggregation services like Disqus. I asked Disqus about their social comment aggregation and was told that they store the aggregated comments on Disqus’ servers. Unlike Friendfeed where I specifically told them to aggregate my content, I didn’t authorize my comments to be aggregated on other blogs, etc. And with regards to Disqus, when I make a comment on Twitter or Friendfeed that is scraped back to the Disqus database, I don’t believe that it’s placed into my Disqus account. This makes it even harder for me to manage. Of course I have practically zero recourse for the blogs that scrape friendfeed/twitter directly.

My take is that it’s fine to display content from other social services but it should be a display only — not/never a store and retain. This way if the content creator decides to delete or edit the content, the updated version will be the one displayed across the Web.

Perhaps this is a data portability topic?

As more social aggregation services pop up and blogs look for more content to monetize, I believe this issue will become a hot topic this year.

The partner sites can also use the DandyID API to find other friends on each network based on their DandyID profile. Certainly sounds more interesting than say the "defaults" on Twitter.

I had a chance to meet with DandyID co-founders Sara Czyzewicz and Arron Kallenberg — check out our video below. They also discuss the API contest where developers can win a bunch of prizes by creating an interesting build on top of DandyID.

– J. Trent Adams
– Daniela Barbosa
– Elias Bizannes
– Brady Brim-DeForest
– Steven Greenberg
– Brett McDowell
– Drummond Reed
– Steve Repetti
– Chris Saad
– Christian Scholz
– Steve Williams
– Phil Wolff

Looks like an intelligent set of folks. Check out all of our DataPortability coverage.

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?

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.

While Google, MySpace and Facebook’s initiatives allow publishers to import more data from the big social networks into their own users’ experiences which will help to seed a new niche community, the CORE piece that is missing is that they don’t empower publishers to aggregate their own membership and fully access their member’s Social Graph.

To achieve this, publishers will want control of their own community profile management, reporting and social graph engine–the heart of what KickApps provides. It’s also important to publishers that core applications (UGC, social networking, widgets, programmable video players, media management, member management), along with 3rd party apps (OpenSocial and Facebook), are also fully integrated with their members’ social graph and member data out of the box.

Net-net, I believe the data portability initiatives are a good thing for the industry. KickApps will integrate with MySpace Data Availability, Google Friend Connect and Facebook Connect such that our publishers can quickly accelerate growth of their own audience by tapping into the “friends” their members already have on the big social networks. In that respect KickApps is not only the foundation of your social graph engine but is a serious accelerator for publishers looking to get the benefits of any “openness” provided by the big social networks while retaining ownership and control of their own audience and social graph data.

As always, the devil is in the details and we’ll all have a front row seat as it develops.

I’m sure the discussion around this will continue in the weeks and months to come. So far, Mike Gunderloy of Web Worker Daily’s post, “Google Friend Connect: What’s the Point?” resonates most with me as he examines this from a web publisher’s point of view. Charlene Li’s blogs about Facebook Connect and Google’s Friend Connect are also a good read, as is Stacey Higginbotham’s post on GigaOM, “Prying Open the Social Graph.”

UPDATE: Eric, KickApps’ founder’s take on this can be found here. Also, Marshall Kirkpatrick has great analysis of this as usual.

This column was provided by Alex Blum, KickApps CEO. KickApps is a hosted, white-label platform that puts social media and online video functionality directly into the hands of every web publisher who aspires to be a media mogul and turns every web designer and developer into a social media rockstar. Check out the KickApps Web site for more information and our KickApps coverage.

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?"

Since that time, the project has had some very high profile wins. The result: all sorts of challenges and opportunities — the kind that comes with rapid scaling.

Challenges like messaging (are these guys all about hype and big vendors?), governance (who makes the decisions around here?), definitions (what does "data portability" really mean anyway) and egos (who the heck is this Chris Saad dude and why is he on TechCrunch and Read/Write Web so much?).

I am so proud of how, at our early flash points, and in the ensuing weeks and months, the co-founders, early participants and new faces banded together to resist the urge to "lock down"’ the project. No smoke filled rooms and exclusivity. Believe me, that would have been an easy way to go. But the tougher path is proving to be the right one for us and for our goals. I am proud of how everyone has been so welcoming of each other and has worked so hard to execute our mission while building our messaging, community and light-weight governance model. I am also proud of how much momentum we have continued to gather.

The resulting opportunities are bright indeed.

We have an opportunity to look back with respect and deference at the Standards Groups and Lobby Groups who have come before us (many of whom are still actively working on and lobbying for openness). Without their amazing ground work and ongoing technical standards work Data Portability would not and will not be possible.

We have the opportunity to look around and recognize the enormous potential we have around us. Potential reflected in the conversation we have helped to shape, in the partners we have managed to invite and the people who have joined us on the journey. This group has earned a reputation for being the most diverse, geographically disbursed and open collaboration projects of its kind. The countries, vendors, and skill sets represented here is astounding. It even feels like we have a great gender balance as well.

And we have the opportunity laying before us. A web-wide ecosystem of inter-operable applications. The beginning of a common data layer for the web.

At all times we need to be clear, however, that our work is to shine a light on the others around us who are at the front lines, to encourage openness and transparency in the community and in the final best practices and manage the expectations of end-users.

I’d like to thank those who have been supportive of the project from the beginning. You have made it happen. I am simply the most visible part of a very, very big team of people who really deserve all the credit – including YOU. Thank you, too, for your personal support and friendship. You have made this fun as well!

I’d also like to thank the loyal opposition, the critics and even the detractors. They have helped us refine our vision and forced us to re- commit to our vision each step of the way.

I look forward to continuing to work with you all to tighten the bolts on the wiki, spread the message and work throughly on our first major deliverable – the DataPortability Technical Best Practices.

Cheers,
Chris Saad
Co-Founder and Chairperson
DataPortability Project

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.

Here’s my favorite question/answer from the conference call:

Q: Will this be available to world MySpace users?
A: On a global basis. Starting on a worldwide basis.

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.

– 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.

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

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 (we are one) 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.

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.

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. Here are the logos for reference:

What DataPortability Is:

• Formalizing the discussion of what a users rights are over their data (?)
• Group is made up of individuals, companies, and organizations
• Output of DP Project is freely available
• Will define "Data Portability" generally and within context of the project
• Will help to normalize terminology used within the Data Portability space
• Will help to syncronize efforts across other Data Portability projects.
• Advocacy for Best Practices in Data Portabililty space.
• Using existing technologies, stitching them together.
• Going to define a vision for the future.
• Going to define capabilities, not technical solutions
• About research and education

What DataPortability Is Not:

• An advocacy for a single technology solution
• Developing new technology solution.
• Going to force data into the public that shouldn’t be
• A legal entity providing legal-level precision.
• Currently end-user focused

Not end-user focused? Isnt’t that the whole point of Data Portability?

Apparently I am wrong, at least from the point that Plaxo chief platform architect Joseph Smarr believes. Found via Valleywag, Smarr runs on 45RPM explaining how data portability works. You know Plaxo, they are the company that hired a world-famous video blogger to hack into Facebook and get data on the blogger’s contacts. Check out the video for Smarr’s definition of Data Portability below.

So help me out here, which definition is correct? If it’s Smarr’s then what good does it do if we need to actually interface into Facebook’s system to grab the friends. I get the idea that if left in Facebook, the data will be up-to-date but if Facebook fails, then what? Maybe we need to create OpenFriend :)