It appears that there have been further developments in the realm of decentralizing social networks since my last post on the topic in August of last year. It was announced this morning that representatives from Google (Brad Fitzpatrick), Plaxo (Joseph Smarr) and Facebook (Benjamin Ling) have joined the DataPortability Workgroup.
Plaxo, Google and Facebook currently represent the key players in the competing approaches to Social Networking Platforms and Data Portability. Users could potentially take their data from the websites they use to reuse elsewhere and vendors could potentially leverage safe cross-site data exchange for a whole new level of innovation.
Among other things, the DataPortability Workgroup is actively working to create the ‘DataPortability Reference Design’ to document the best practices for integrating existing open standards and protocols for maximum interoperability.
Data privacy, however, is another issue. It is exciting though to see where this is going.
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I am excited by Google and Facebook taking the lead on this and setting an example.
I was getting worried about Facebook and their willingness to work with others.
I was losing faith in them as a viable platform.
I too am excited to see where this goes.
Comment by Kin Lane - January 8, 2008 3:54 pm
[...] this development goes. The announcement comes on the heels of Google (amongst others) joining the DataPortability Working Group. They’ve posted a cool video primer on how the API works. You can watch the video [...]
Pingback by Wikinomics » Blog Archive » Google gets an upgrade - February 1, 2008 8:17 pm
[...] invite users to any number of your networks. With the growing dataportability movement (read more here and here), this might not be as hard or as far away as you might [...]
Pingback by Wikinomics » Blog Archive » MC Hammer - Social Networker - March 5, 2008 3:39 pm