Taking a quick break from the daily chores to highlight this fairly big news announcement coming out of the Dataportability Workgroup that Google, Facebook and Plaxo have joined the workgroup today. I am an active member of the DP Workgroup** so congrats to all involved!The DataPortability Workgroup is, among other things, actively working to create the 'DataPortability Reference Design' to document the best practices for integrating existing open standards and protocols for maximum interoperability.
Yeah so what does that mean for you? Basically that users will be able to access their social data eventually across all the applications, social networking sites and widgets that implement these designs into their systems and importantly companies who are implementing services will have standards to adopt to ensure maximum accountability and usability.
The technologies that the DataPortability workgroup are advocating are not necessarily "new" or propriety- they include existing open standards that you might have already heard of like RDF, RSS, OpenID, Microformats and others. The objective is to create a stack of services that support dataportabilty.
Techcrunch coverage here and ReadWriteWeb's coverage. Why is this a big deal?
The DP Workgroup over the last few months have been implementing and supporting some great initiatives just take a look at the conversations over at the Dataportability Google Group so why will the addition of Google, Facebook, Plaxo and hopefully others be a big deal? Well, who are the biggest players that hold most of your data online? Google is probably the biggest and Facebook, and Plaxo are just some of the others biggies. This is great news.
**NOTE**I have been a Dataportability Workgroup member from the beginning thanks to my involvement with APML and Chris Saad's (the DP Workgroup's chair and Particls CEO) excellent support and inclusion. Although i work for Dow Jones, being a member of the DP Workgroup does not imply that Dow Jones itself is currently supporting the Workgroup (but we are active W3C members and supporters of standards like RDF). I understand that the new members from Google, Facebook and Plaxo however are representing their companies.
2 comments :
So, this caused a flurry of blog excitement. Has anything happened since? Or is this one of those things where we won't know what it means for a long time?
- Stuart
Yes. And there certainly has been a lot of talk on this specific issue the "now what"- some who bring up this subject are only still talking but many are doing.
Have you checked in on the activity in the Google Group?
http://groups.google.com/group/dataportability-public
We have also updated the main site based on feedback from various folks
http://dataportability.org/ so people can access the work that is done easily.
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