Let me apologize in advance for this essay, rather than blog. I’ll also post more entries on this topic over the coming weeks …

I toyed with two different titles for this blog. I settled on Go Big or Go Home – the other, Dataportability.org’s Standards Mashup is equally appropriate.

Dataportability.org, led by Chris Saad, has a big vision - boil the ocean big, not Texas big. The first victory has been to get the major players on board – Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, Facebook, MySpace, Digg, Plaxo, SixApart, LinkedIn. The second is to garner support from the multiple tangential (and in some instances, competing) standards initiatives who can dogpile into this venn diagram intersect …

The “big three” however are announcing their own initiatives:

  • Google Friend Connect … as reported by Michael Arrington at TechCrunch Google will launch a new product on Monday (May 12th, 2008) called “Friend Connect,” which will be a set of APIs for Open Social participants to pull profile information from social networks into third party websites
  • MySpace DataAvailability … announced Thursday May 8th, 2008
  • Facebook Connect … announced Friday May 9th, 2008 including key features around trusted authentication, real identity (profile, profile exchange), friends access and dynamic privacy

Expect others to follow.

Seems like the big players are already going down their own path … as well as ‘supporting’ Dataportability.org. Wow, there’s a shock. Seen that before in the software industry more than once over the past twenty years or so …

Next, the mission and vision stuff for Dataprtoability.org (verbatim from the website) …

Mission: To Consult, Design, Educate and Advocate Interoperable DataPortability to Users, Developers and Vendors

Definition: DataPortability is the option to share or move your personal data between trusted applications and vendors.

Data portability is good, right? Depends upon your point of view. This is an extremely complex topic and not one that can be brushed off with the “free and open” for everyone argument. I like the word “option” in the definition …

The definition “trusted application or vendor” is going to need a little focus … what is the trust model? What is a trusted application? Who is a trusted vendor?

The cross-hairs of controversy will focus on personally identifiable data … not technical interoperability … and the technical interoperability issues are not insignificant.

What is not clear is whether Datapaortaiblity.org is a standards body, a community, an advocacy group or a platform for Chris Saad’s Faraday Media and Attention Profiling Markup Language. The early community building work appears to be extremely promising. The buzz, marketing and energy have certainly been impressive.

IMHO, the community needs to create conversation around the big issues that they will encounter on this journey:

  • Data privacy
  • Data rights (think Creative Commons guys, not just rel-license …)
  • Data lineage
  • Data quality
  • Data federation
  • Data persistence

The short summary of partners announced on the Dataportability.org website cover almost the entire waterfront (more participants / partners to dogpile?) …

OpenID – Interoperable, user-centric identity … think portable identity … note that the Dataportability.org Project Charter website also supports the Higgins Project and OSIS – Open-Source Identity Systems

OAuth – Secure API authentication

RSS – Web syndication (others standards include ATOM and RDF Site Framework)

OPML - exchange of reading lists between News Readers

MicroFormats – a collection of standards on people & organizations, calendars & events, opinions, ratings & reviews, social networks, license types, tags, keywords, categories, lists, outlines, etc.

RDF – W3C’s lightweight ontology for data, knowledge sharing using XML syntax

APML – Attention Profiling Markup Language

XMPP - Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP) … think IM, presence based on the Jabber open source protocol

A few observations:

  • Dataportability.org needs to move past the logo wars and marketing announcements
  • The genie is out of the bottle … Dataportability.org will need to respond to the agendas of the major players – and they are moving ahead aggressively
  • To be relevant, Dataportability.org will need to focus on some high profile, visible wins for the community

Finally, the About Us page needs to be changed from …

“Our about page is lacking at the moment.
Given we are a community driven Project, would you care to add to it?”

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