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.