Developers and (some) companies are tired of lock-in to just one social networking site API.
Unlike current primarily commercial efforts, a genuine solution to this demand requires careful attention to issues of accessibility, privacy, and non-profit and educational use.Similar to "browser wars," there now are competing ways to share social graph data on the Internet.
Obviously a W3C-approved Semantic Web compatible standard way of doing this would be ideal.
Brad Fitzpatrick over at Google is working on using the hCard and XFN microformats to create and track identities.
Contact Finder follows relationships and indexes whose linked to whom...
Allows a much-looser and quicker moving forum than a Working Group for exploratory purposes, allows creation of a Working Group and recommendations to be "fast-tracked."
Serves as a forum inside the W3C to get diverse groups interested in this communicating, with less patent and less membership requirements, so major corporations and non-W3C members can participate
Very transparent, with meeting minutes and mailing list will be open to the public..
Tim Berners-Lee believes the Web can evolve what he terms a Giant Global Graph that connects people and their relationships.
More expansive than traditional social data, including data such as calendars (scheduling meetings), reviews (reviewing movies), to-do lists, shopping (booking an airplane), genealogies.Just publish all your data on the Web will not work for sensitive social data.
We need will need to harmonize and even research solutionsin this area, such as managing multiple profiles, trust, security, deleting your data on command...The two questions are:
Harmonize and stabilize relevant standards and think through privacy and identity issues with the Semantic Web.
Especially stabilization of FOAF (Friend of a Friend Vocabulary).Determine the privacy story for merging heterogeneous data, how to mix OpenID, OAuth, and FOAF together. With W3C Fellowship providing team resources, have strict timeline with three interoperable implementations, test-cases, and strict accessibility and royalty-free patent guidelines.
Last six months (from Last Call to Candidate Recommendation to W3C Recommendation) will focus on dissemination.
Having a patent in supposed open standard that companies unwittingly implement is an instant business plan for troll.
For examples, see the conflict over XRIs (used in some ideas about data portability!) in the W3C, which led to the development of the W3C's patent policy.Royalty-Free might discourage both large corporations with huge numbers of patents from participating...but social data portability is only going to work if everyone comes to the table honestly and openly.
Unlikely that we can get organizations to commit to a single API (OpenSocial, Microsoft Contact API, Facebook Developer Platform)
Likely that we can create a common semantic and extensible meta-model that maps and normalizes the data existing APIs export.Unlikely that we can pass a single standard for privacy and authentication on the Web
Likely that we can use the W3C to harmonize other technologies like OAuth with existing W3C workUnlikely that the W3C can produce a single monolithic technology architecture for the Social Web
Likely that we can produce some best practices (including accessibility) with three exemplary and compatible open source implementations that could be used by non-profit and educational institutions.So we need to actively involve users - in the case of of the Uni. of Edinburgh - students and staff.
This is a separate activity from the rest of the effort, but an example that will be done to provide examples for everyone involved to do their own user study with their respective interest group, from developers to corporate users.This issue has been hot in the media, see all the news simply when someone joins DataPortability.org listserv.
Will distribute information at major conferences in Web development, such as World Wide Web Conference, XTech, SXSW, International Semantic Web Conference and so on..
Nothing more powerful than a hands-on tutorial at a conference, a BarCamp, or - best yet! - one-to-one.
Everything will be kept track using a blog and users will be able to join public list-serv and get account on public wiki
An open-source project to help people find their lost loved ones in aftermath of Katrina. Within three days, over half a million people's contact info and status was posted.
Due to lack of open-standards like FOAF based on Semantic Web technologies could not easily merge or query data from diverse sources like Craigslist and the Gulf News.Due to lack of privacy practice they had to eventually take down entire project simply because newspapers and others threatened to sue.
William Morris. A Dream of John Ball