Chris Mesina has a great post up about data portability.
1) It dives into the semantic meaning of the phrase and issues it raises about the actual nature of what needs to be built – is it data a physical thing that is ported around? or is it a digital thing that can be copied and moved and is present in the cloud. The nature of the metaphor makes a difference
2) He articulates the relationship between OpenID along with OAuth and other open standards listed on DP’s home page as proposed standards in the “social stack” – (there is none officially)
3) The Risks associated with Data Portability are clearly articulated
* Who does DP speak for and how is that different from the perception of who it speaks for
* Privacy – is it being addressed well? can it be addressed well with the current approach? what are the risks to the technologies if it is not addressed well.
4) What is Good about Data Portability.
* The phrase has created a conversation that can be useful in teasing out the more gnarly issues involved in developing social applications. He is cautionary about this though if the phrase is misunderstood and people have bad experiences with it – does that mean the technologies will be perceived as failures and there is a retreat back to walled gardens.
He closes with this
I think the next evolution of the social web is going to be one where we take certain things, like identity, like portable contact lists, like better and more consistent permissioning systems as givens, and as a result, will lead to much more interesting, more compelling, and, perhaps even more lucrative, uses of the open social web.
This whole posts gets to the heart of the question we will be opening up the Data Sharing Summit with an “unpanel” on Thursday.
Data Sharing: What Could Go Wrong?
Bob Blakely from the Burton Group will open the conversation
What data is shared?
Who’s data is it?
Who should be able to move it? and under what conditions should they be able to do so?
Other Conversant are:
* Daniela Barbosa, DataPortability.org (day job at Dow Jones)
* Marc Canter, Broadband Mechanics
* Jospeh Smarr, Plaxo
* Ken Kovash, Mozilla
Should be very interesting getting to the heart of these matters.
If you care to read it Chris Saad has a response to Factory Joe’s post here.
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