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

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

The DataPortability Workgroup is sponsoring an initiative called ‘GraphSync’. Here’s a snippet from the site:

Your challenge, should you choose to accept it…

1. Pick a silo of proprietary social graph data
2. Write some open source code to extract the data
3. Place that data into the open formats listed below.
4. Link to the code repository on the DataPortability Wiki.
5. Win the love and admiration of a grateful community

So the idea is to build something much like the LinkedIn/Facebook/Spock ‘Import your contacts from Gmail’ feature in an open-source way. Instead of importing from Gmail, the hope is to get data out of social networks, IM buddy lists and more and store it in open standards.

Jump onto the site, join the google group and get into it. Please don’t forget to re-blog or tweet this to help spread the word.

More at www.graphsync.com

Read/Write Web, probably the most important tech/start-up blog around these days, has declared 2008 the year of Open Data - or as we like to call it, DataPortability.

As Alex wrote here: “The old perception is that closed data is a competitive advantage. The new reality is that open data is a competitive advantage. The likely solution then is to stop worrying about protecting information and instead start charging for it, by offering an API.”

So overall, we think 2008 will be a bumper year for the Open Source movement on the Web. What do you think? What other parts of the Web are ripe for open source initiatives next year?

Looking forward to it!

We prefer the name ‘Data Portability’ because open suggests free of restrictions, but sometimes users want restrictions; privacy for example.

Fred often gets things before the other VCs out there. That’s why he is one of the few I still read.

He has posted an interesting breakdown of market forces that are driving our work at DataPortability.org. He calls it “The Social Graph In The Second Inning”

Learn more about Data Portability and the open standards stack for open social graphs at www.dataportability.org

He concludes:

What I want is a single aggregated social graph that I control that has all of this data in it. That “meta social graph” can then be applied by ME to the interface I want on top off all my messaging systems.

This is going to happen. It has to. And that’s why we are in the second inning of this social graph thing. I think Facebook is going to be a big winner, possibly the Google of the social graph movement, but there’s a lot of baseball to play before this game is over.

He calls it a meta social graph - I call it a Personal Social Network. Same thing.

I spoke to Duncan Riley from Techcrunch about it recently - Listen to the podcast.

Social Network Portability is a cause near and dear to our heart here at Engagd. The belief that users own their own data and should be able to transport their identity and relationships from one silo to another is central to our mission and business.

Some very smart heroes of mine are working on just that problem. Read more about it on Brian Oberkirch’s post. There is also a Wiki.

Engagd currently supports this effort by further developing the APML ecosystem. As most people know APML stands for Attention Profiling Markup Language. It’s described on the APML Workgroup site as:

APML allows users to export and use their own personal Attention Profile in much the same way that OPML allows them to export their reading lists from Feed Readers.

The idea is to boil down all forms of Attention Data – including Browser History, OPML, Attention.XML, Email etc – to a portable file format containing a description of ranked user interests.

This means that users can gather their implicit data from Social Networks (and any other sort of web application) and create a portable profile of their interests.

In a world where time is limited and information is abundant, Attention is a key part of the puzzle.