It's been a busy few weeks for DataPortability.org with announcements from many sides including Google (Friend Connect), Facebook (Connect) and MySpace (Data Availability). Next week, the Semantic Technologies Conference will be held in San Jose, California, and you can bet that discussions around the need for portable data will be scattered throughout.
- On Monday, Stefan, Uldis and I will present a tutorial (which will also cover data portability aspects of ontologies such as SIOC and FOAF) entitled "The Future of Social Networks: The Need for Semantics".
- On Monday evening at 8 PM, there will be an informal meetup of some DataPortability.org people in the Fairmont Hotel's Lobby Lounge, so if you have an interest in data portability, feel free to join us.
- On Tuesday at 7:15 AM, I will chair a "Data Portability Interest Group" meeting. Attendees will include Chris Saad, Daniela Barbosa, Henry Story, and yours truly.
- Then on Tuesday afternoon at 2:00 PM, Jim Benedetto, Senior Vice President of Technology with MySpace will talk about "Data Availability at MySpace".
Last month, IEEE Computing published an article by Karen Heyman entitled "The Move to Make Social Data Portable". I was interviewed for the piece along with Michael Pick (social media expert), Duncan Riley (b5media), John McCrea (Plaxo), Craig Knoblock (ISI), Chris Saad (DataPortability.org), Dave Treadwell (Microsoft), Kevin Marks (Google), Chris Kelly (Facebook), Marc Canter (Broadband Mechanics), and Bill Washburn (OpenID). Technology solutions mentioned included RSS, OpenID, OAuth, microformats, RDF, APML, SIOC and FOAF. Here are my original answers to Karen's questions.