Translation: I agree with James Snell, who just made that point.

But here’s a challenge for social networks: how about you all add links to other social networks. So, when I look up Dave Winer on Twitter, for instance, I could see that he’s also on Flickr and Facebook.

For instance, I’m on Upcoming.org. If you visit me there you won’t have a clue that I’m also on Twitter, Flickr, Facebook, Yelp and a variety of other networks.

Plaxo and Pownce are two that are already letting me add links to other networks I’m on. I’m wondering if the industry could come up with some auto discovery protocols and/or ways to manually link things up?

Doing just this small step would greatly help us get down the road to some sort of federated system where I don’t need to fill out my information for each of my networks I’m on. It really is a pain in the behind to keep them all up to date.

Please? Pretty please?

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As a user it frustrates me to no end when I cannot easily and seemlessly move my data between services. Whether it’s blog posts, bookmarks, photos, videos, favorites, calendar data, email, or any other type of media, data, first and foremost, ought to belong to the user.

From Schmidt:

“If you look at the historical large company behavior, they ultimately do things to protect their business practices or monopoly or what have you, against the choice of the users,” he said. “The more we can, for example, let users move their data around, never trap the data of an end user, let them move it if they don’t like us, the better.”

It’s nice to hear these kind of comments coming from the CEO of Google.

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Thomas Hawk is a San Francisco based photographer and technology writer.
He publishes the web site Thomas Hawk’s Digital Connection and is also
the Evangelist and CEO of the photo sharing site Zooomr.

Canadian consumers want to be able to shop for cellular providers without sacrificing their existing cellphone number upon changing carriers.

According to the Ottawa Business Journal, this will come to pass, but not until September 1 at the earliest. Consumers will then have number portability of their cell numbers as well as their landlines, provided their change of carrier is still within the same calling area.

Canadians should expect some delays in moving a number from one carrier to another, particularly if they are moving a landline number to a cellular provider. Sprint Nextel notes in the US that the process can take up to two weeks, and possibly longer in the landline move scenario.

David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business. Email him here.