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

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?”

Just a quick note to let you know that we have rolled in a number of Engagd bugfixes over the last few weeks.

Please keep up the great feedback and let us know if you come across anything else that doesn’t work quite right for you!

Still a lot more to come!

Thanks to Ash, Paul and the team.

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.

Matthias Pfefferle has developed a Wordpress plugin to generate APML from your WordPress categories. Very cool.

Check it out here.