Ross Dawson has published a list of the top 60 web apps in Australia in the BRW this week. At number 5, our very own Engagd.com - the engine that powers Attention Profiling for the web at large as well as Particls version 2.

This is a testament to the hard work and dedication of the development team. A huge thanks to Ashley Angell, Paul Jones and Jon Cianciullo who have been working tirelessly to manage, build and polish the Engagd platform.

Particls itself came in at 21. That will change of course once we launch the new version!

Thanks to Ross for his hard work compiling the list and including us.

Ashley went to Sydney to demo Engagd at the celebration party. By all accounts it was a big success. Somehow he made a developer platform interesting for a non-technical audience. Good work my friend!

I’ve just wired up the service update RSS feeds to the Engagd Twitter bot. So if you use (or are planning to use) the Engagd APIs, be sure to subscribe via Twitter or RSS to stay up-to-date with status updates about the platform and its features!

We will, of course, post major updates here to the blog as well.

• Twitter Bot (Updates about all services and the blog)
• Profiler Changelog RSS Feed
• ItemRank Changelog RSS Feed
• APML Changelog RSS Feed

If we can provide you with any more info about the platform and changes as they occur - please let us know!

This is a courtesy warning that we will be taking Engagd offline for a few days while we upgrade the platform to a new improved version.

While the updates are mostly geared towards improving the platform and the APIs, there are a few subtle UI improvements to make using the platform a little usable.

A limited list of the changes include:

• Better error handling and correction.
• Blank documents not longer return a exception message, and instead return a blank form of the requested document.
• Better profiling results.
• Faster, more immediate profiling.
• ItemRank is far more stable and reliable with its ranked feeds.
• Many other enhancements.

These upgrades are expected to take quite some time to deploy, so we ask that you be patient during the migration and we apologize for any inconvenience.

Today sees the release of the first monthly DataPortability Report. The report is collated by the DataPortability Evangelism Action Group based on feedback and work done by the DataPortability Action Groups and any and all groups engaged in solving the Data Portability problem - particularly standards groups.

The goal of the group is to highlight gains made for the cause, and spotlight failures or holdups that need to be overcome.

We hope these reports will serve as digests for those who want to follow the conversation but don’t have the time to monitor the conversation closely.

Read: DataPortability Report #1 - 30th Jan 08

Particular thanks must go to Marjolein, Elias, Daniela and the whole EAG team for putting it together.

Comments are welcome on the page.

I’d personally like to welcome Dries Buytaert (Drupal), Tariq Krim (Netvibes) and Scott Kveton (MyStrands) to the DataPortability.org Workgroup.

I have also posted a DataPortability Roadmap Draft. I welcome feedback.

Time to create some structure for the newcomers and get some work done!

I’d personally like to welcome Matthew Rothenberg (Flickr), Blain Cook (Twitter) and Steve Ganz & Jim Meyer (LinkedIn) to the DataPortability.org discussion.

To quote Steve Ganz on the LinkedIn blog:

“LinkedIn is committed to helping professionals be more productive in their everyday work life. These technologies are among the powerful tools that enable us to do this. So it makes sense that we would support efforts like DataPortability.org and Social Network Portability. We’re happy to share what we’ve learned along the way with the community and look forward to learning from the experience of others.”

I look forward to working with all the individuals involved in the group to tell the technical, political, legal and user experience story of Data Portability.

The announcement is also covered here:

Read/Write Web
Techcrunch
Techmeme
LinkedIn blog

Regular users of Engagd may have noticed some stability and speed increases recently, as we deployed some much needed patches to the entire Engagd platform last night. These make up the initial stage of some upcoming enhancements and are mostly focused towards improving the API code-base.

Fixes include;

• Increased fault tolerance on the processing of ATOM feeds.
• Added additional error handling to various API calls.
• Increased performance and reliability of message queuing system for Profiler.

I’d like to welcome all the new subscribers to this feed. There are a lot of you!

I’d just like to point out, however, that there was an error in the metadata for the DataPortability page that many of you subscribed to the APML RSS feed instead of the DataPortability RSS feed. If you are getting this post it means you are subscribed to either the APML or the Engagd feed and NOT the DataPortability feed.

While there are often cross-posts between the feeds, the APML feed focuses mainly on updates that affect the APML specification only. The DataPortability feed is much broader and includes information about other standards as they apply to user rights and data interchange.

If you would like to get DataPortability updates, please make sure you also subscribe to this feed: http://feeds.feedburner.com/dataportability

I apologize for the error and inconvenience. Feel free to flame me in comments!

Chris

So, we all know the story…

Robert Scoble tried to extract his personal social graph information from Facebook and Facebook suspended his account.

Robert has since joined the DataPortability.org workgroup to support our work to create free, open and standards based support for data sharing between services.

I’d now like to formally invite Facebook to join the DataPortability Workgroup.

This is both a business opportunity and a cultural and ethical imperative for them. Open is not just a buzz word. It means that you play nice with others. Even others that are not inside your walled garden. By announcing their support, Facebook has an opportunity to reclaim their place as the most open social network around - and it’s great for users too.

If you notice by looking at the roster of contributors to DataPortability, there are already individuals involved who also happen to work for Yahoo, Myspace, Seesmic, Disney, BBC, NineMSN, Dow Jones/Fox and others. It’s time for Facebook to join the conversation!

I welcome them to email me at me@chrissaad.com and I will gladly send them an invite to the Google group.

Also, watch the latest video from Scoble on the issue.

Update: Mashable has a poll on the subject
Update: Techcrunch covers it as well

Some interesting blog posts emerged over the last few days - particularly around the announcement of APML support in Ma.gnolia.

Here are some highlights:

From Jaffamonkey

I have latched onto APML, which I consider personally to be the best for web user profiling, and already many services exist to generate and manipulate APML data. What is this project for? The Graphsync project also summarised an often forgotten principle of the internet, freedom and privacy.

From Don Crowley

“magnol.ia is supporting APML. Delicious! what are your plans for the next few months? Gonna roll out 2.0? Gonna support APML as well? Let us know! Please.”

From Jackson Miller

“Now we have RSS readers that are publishing APML (NewsGator and NetNewsWire), and Ma.gnolia is publishing APML about bookmarks. I could easily make statzen publish APML about who you link to on your own blog. I am thinking Tweeterboard could/should add APML since attention is essentially what they are tracking. So what communications are missing?”