DataPortability.org is heading up a workgroup that will hopefully do just that. While many groups and companies are taking part in this effort, the recent addition of a few big name players has attracted a lot of attention.

The following companies are among those that recently joined the workgroup:

• Google
• Facebook
• Plaxo
• LinkedIn
• Flickr
• SixApart
• Twitter
• Microsoft

According to ReadWriteWeb, Mozilla is examining the idea of joining the workgroup and is expected to join.

WebProNews spoke with Chris Saad, the Co-Founder and Chairman of Data Portability. He said,

“…Data Portability Workgroup is a group of passionate individuals in various fields of expertise from bloggers, to technical experts, to legal experts, to vendors who are interested in solving the problem of creating bridges between applications, so users can ultimately share their videos, photos, documents, and friends….”

This coming together with rival companies is a big step for those involved. However, they all realize the results will benefit their own individual companies. WebProNews contacted Google and Facebook and while they were unable to interview, they did release the following statements.

"Google shares DataPortability.org’s vision of open standards, transparency, and user choice.  We’re looking forward to participating in an ongoing and important conversation about these issues." — Google Spokesperson

“We are committed to giving users control of their data on Facebook and, at the same time, safeguarding the privacy of users. Facebook joined the DataPortability Workgroup in order to actively participate in industry dialogue and to represent feedback from the Facebook community.” — Ben Ling, the Director of Product Marketing for Facebook Platform and Facebook’s Representative in the Data Portability Workgroup.

Speaking of Facebook, it is very interesting that both Robert Scoble and Plaxo have joined the workgroup considering the recent controversial issue involving the three companies.

Plaxo asked Scoble to test one of their features to see if it would export data from Facebook and then import it into Plaxo. Facebook detected the activity and kicked Robert Scoble off Facebook.

Both Data Portability and Plaxo agree that the situation brought the issue of data portability to forefront of everyone’s focus.

Plaxo’s Vice President of Marketing, John McCrea said,

“… Everyone knew that 2008 would be the year for data portability, but this situation brought the discussion to the front and center…”

To get more information on the Data Portability Workgroup, check out the WebProNews video. It takes a deeper look at the topic including interviews from Chris Saad, John McCrea, and Plaxo’s Representative in the Data Portability Workgroup, Joseph Smarr.

Mac clients have a new version of the Plaxo application, which brings their Pulse feature to the Address Book. Pulse hooks up to what people call the ‘social graph’, essentially the social networking people do through a variety of services like Twitter, Digg, and other sites.

Plaxo users will want to use some care in setting up Plaxo, either in Mac Address Book or in Microsoft Outlook. Pulse can very effectively share one’s social activity with other contacts in Plaxo. While that may be the great promise of the social graph, there might be things people would rather not have charted with all of their contacts.

Once in place, Pulse for Mac Address Book provides a single point of contact for the various social updates other Plaxo connections perform. But wasn’t the whole point of the modern Internet, and even Plaxo, to free people from a fixed software client?

Who to believe? Valleywag and Venture Beat seem convinced that Facebook will buy Plaxo:

Facebook is “one hundred percent” buying Plaxo, we’ve just heard from a source.

Others like TechCrunch aren’t convinced:

Why would Facebook part with the rumored $200 million for a service that is so relatively small? Crazier deals have been done, but this one isn’t happening (yet).

Why indeed. Plug-ins, to bring contact information from multiple sources into one place, may be the new plastics. Venture Beat says Plaxo has that solved.

Recent news about Plaxo and Facebook centered on Robert Scoble prying data out of Facebook using an alpha build of a Plaxo tool. Perhaps the gregarious blogger stumbled upon something people weren’t meant to see?

Facebook is “one hundred percent” buying Plaxo, we’ve just heard from a source.

Wow, starting your story with that sentence certainly grabs your attention, doesn’t it? VentureBeat’s managed to make a statement of "fact" without actually saying that it has confirmed the story. Nice!

Well, assuming it’s "one hunded percent" then I guess we can soon expect our Plaxo accounts to start sniffing around our business contacts and phoning home to the Facebook mothership. You see, part of the reason why Facebook would be interested in coughing-up as much as $200M for Plaxo is that the service has done a great job of convincing us to install its plugins and share our contact info.

That’s the type of info that would be very valuable to Facebook…

Mountain View, Calif.-based Plaxo could help Facebook gather data through its large user base, and through its plugins for email programs Microsoft Outlook, Mac Mail, and Thunderbird as well as a plugin for instant message service AIM, among others. Plaxo has developed technology to sync contacts through its home web site and its plugins, to create a sort of universal address book. It has also developed native mobile syncing technology for Windows Mobile and other mobile operating systems. Syncing between all of these different services is a very hard problem — that Plaxo has solved.

If the deal goes through, and I start seeing Facebook all over my Plaxo account, I for one won’t be rejoicing. Maybe I’m just too immersed in social media, but I’m just not thrilled about Facebook these days. My six month love affair ended recently as I realized that my contacts just want to send me chain letters or join groups to save a TV show. Nope, I’m finding it to be more enjoyable to connect with those in my Twitter network–which, BTW, could really benefit from a stronger "network" component.

Still, if my love affair with Facebook has dwindled, the one with Plaxo is stone cold. I haven’t touched Plaxo in about a year–when I stopped using Outlook, Plaxo became impotent–and so they can feel free to hook-up and share all the info they want. There, doesn’t it feel good to have the Pilgrim’s blessing on the marriage?

Do you use Plaxo? Have you stopped using Facebook? Do you think this will be the best union since TomKat?

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For all the brouhaha about Scoble and what an attention hog he is, there was an important point in all of that, which was laid out quite well earlier today in a thoughtful post at GigaOm by my friend Alec Saunders of Iotum.

Let’s hope this effort makes it easier to own your own data, and move freely from place to place.

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Scoble, whose account is later reinstated, is denounced for being a publicity-seeking limelight hog, and for using a script from Plaxo that is an egregious breach of Facebook’s terms of use (since it uses optical character recognition to grab email addresses, which the site keeps as image files).

Some have sided with Scoble, because they feel Facebook should allow users to export their data, while others argue that the site can do whatever it wants, and when you sign the terms of use you effectively agree that you accept that. Whatever you think of Scoble and Plaxo’s script, however (which seems a little devious to me), there is an important issue at the centre of this Techmeme frenzy, as Scott Karp at Publishing 2.0 and others have pointed out: Who owns your data?

In a post I came across this morning, Paul Buchheit (the guy who created Gmail) makes an interesting point, which is that many other services — including Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail and LinkedIn — allow you to import your addresses from some other program or service. I just finished doing exactly that with Last.fm, and I’ve done it with countless other services as well, including (most recently) an aggregator called Spokeo.

So how come you can do that with every service except Facebook? That doesn’t seem right. The Data Portability Group has extended an invitation to the site to join their push for a single standard. Marc Canter thinks we need better access controls for our data, and Chris “Factory Joe” Messina thinks that we need to move away from using our email addresses as the core of our online identities, and move towards a URL-based system. One thing is for sure: this issue isn’t going to go away.

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Facebook sent him an email that accused him of running an automated script which is in violation of Facebook’s terms of use.

Robert was indeed running an automated script as he explains in a post today, testing an as yet unreleased feature of Plaxo Pulse that scrapes Facebook pages for content like email addresses.

Blogosphere opinion about this issue seems more or less evenly divided if linked discussions shown on Techeme are any indicator, on support for Robert or support for Facebook’s action.

Either way, it throws a bright spotlight on data portability and who owns your data on a social network.

Shel and I talked about this as part of a discussion in today’s episode #307 of the FIR podcast.

What’s prompted this post is an interesting angle to the story by Michael Arrington writing in TechCrunch:

[…] [Plaxo] developed optical character recognition software to recognize email addresses and add them to the export.

Facebook doesn’t like this, of course. But it isn’t Plaxo that’s paying the price. It’s the journalists and bloggers who’ve been testing out the service.

[…] Plaxo was certainly aware of the risk. In an email from the company asking me to try the service last week, they said “We don’t know whether Facebook will try to shut us down (despite their increasing verbal support for the concepts of open-ness), so we want to let a few key folks have access to the functionality before we make it available to everyone.”

Yeah, they guessed right. Plaxo started running automated scripts against Facebook without any warning or discussion with them beforehand, in violation of their terms of service and, I’ll add, common sense. Of course users were shut down. Facebook must regulate this kind of behavior, without it the service would crumble.

So let me get this right.

Not only do you appear to have some journalists and bloggers using a social network in a way that’s in clear violation of the terms of use, using a tool produced by a company who thinks Facebook could take some disruptive action as a result, but also those same journalists and bloggers would have done this with some broad awareness that they might be violating terms of use.

They did read those terms of use, right?

It seems to me that the relevant part that addresses this is in the paragraph headed ‘Proprietary Rights in Site Content; Limited License’:

[…] Except for your own User Content, you may not upload or republish Site Content on any Internet, Intranet or Extranet site or incorporate the information in any other database or compilation, and any other use of the Site Content is strictly prohibited. Such license is subject to these Terms of Use and does not include use of any data mining, robots or similar data gathering or extraction methods. Any use of the Site or the Site Content other than as specifically authorized herein, without the prior written permission of Company, is strictly prohibited and will terminate the license granted herein.

So tell me – what envelope is being pushed here? Investigating new ways of connecting the dots, or getting to the limits of common sense?

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What does it collect?

Names and email address and birthday.

Why those? Because it’s trying to connect Facebook names with names in its database.

For instance, it learned that of the 5,000 people in my Facebook account about 1,800 were already on Plaxo.

It did NOT look at anything else. Just this stuff, no social graph data. No personal information.

Why do this?

I wanted to get all my contacts into my Microsoft Outlook address book and hook them up with the Plaxo system, which 1,800 of my friends are already on.

It’s ironic that you can import your Gmail address book into Facebook but you can’t export back out.

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Plaxo used to be closely associated with spammy social networking.  These days, it has been doing much better, and after its inclusion in Google’s OpenSocial initiative was announced, it did better still.  So in some corners, hard feelings remain, while others are trying to look at the current situation.

Both views are valid – the average would-be user is just as likely to hold a grudge as anybody else.  So when Michael Arrington reported that Plaxo had "hired an investment bank, Revolution Partners, who are spearheading the sale effort," a good deal of discussion broke out.

Then came a key piece of information: Andrew Ross Sorkin stated, "The company, which has not made a profit, is seeking as much as $100 million."  Given the economy’s current state, bidders may not be fighting each other for the right to spend so much money.  Then again, with its 15 million users, Plaxo may make a tempting acquisition target.

We’ll see where this goes, then, and how quickly it gets there.  Clues about the state of OpenSocial and social networking in general will probably be dropped along the way.

He also mentions one I’ve not thought of as a social network – Viadeo. It seems to me to be more of a news portal. Plus no mention of MySpace, still the giant of social networks.

But I’m sure Lunn will turn out to have made some pretty good predictions. He has some good arguments on developments by marketers in monetizing social networks as well as what might happen in a marketplace that’s rapidly changing through a mixture of acquisitions, investments, combinations and evolving offerings.

As a member of some of these social networks, I’m not sure I find any of this appealing at all.

I’ve been a member of LinkedIn and Xing (previously known as OpenBC) since 2004, MySpace since 2006 and Facebook earlier this year. I had a flirtation with Plaxo a few years ago that never went anywhere.

Facebook is currently my network du jour although I’m becoming quite disenchanted with what’s going on there regarding the Beacon advertising opt-in/opt-out debacle, a disastrous idea that seems to be gaining more negative commentary every day.

Basically, my trust in Facebook is rapidly diminishing.

And it’s all about trust, isn’t it? If you can’t trust the people who run the places you participate in, you’re going to leave.

Looking at much of what Lunn predicts I get the feeling that anyone who’s a member in any of these big social networks is seen as a commodity, a number to be marketed at, sold to and generally regarded as just another notch on a marketer’s scoreboard.

Well, count me out in that case.

In July, I wrote about Facebook versus other networks and relevance concerning what you want to put in and get out of being a participant in a social network.

This is to do with niche networks – those social networks that are small, and tailored to specific interests that aren’t necessarily mainstream.

In my case, I’m referring to niche networks like MyRagan.com and Melcrum’s Communicators Network, both relevant to my professional interest area of organizational communication. Both of those networks are growing fast.

In that July post, I also talked about why Facebook was so compelling, which focused on its ease of use, cool applications and informality.

All important things, to be sure, yet nowhere near as important as trust.

In July, my conclusion was this:

[…] Sooner or later, a crunch may come where I decide to go with the one that provides all I need in one place – the opportunities to connect and the opportunities to collaborate.

I wonder how long that will be.

I think that moment has arrived.

Ironic, really, as I meant that conclusion to be about moving closer to Facebook. The meaning for me today is not towards Facebook and other big networks but away.

Here’s my prediction for 2008 – we’ll also see a rise in niche networks, well outside the frame of the big ones Lunn talks about.

The ones that become successful – which certainly doesn’t necessarily mean the ones that are biggest – are the ones you trust.

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