A lot of the biggest social media blogs are pretty fired up today about the announcement that reps from Facebook and Google (and Plaxo) had signed on to be part of the DataPortability Workgroup, whose mission is:
To put all existing technologies and initiatives in context to create a reference design for end-to-end Data Portability. To promote that design to the developer, vendor and end-user community.
I'm a little less fired up. As Webware says:
Nevertheless, it's important to keep in mind that DataPortability, unlike Google's OpenSocial, is not an agreement to adopt a set of standards. It's a group of Web personalities, many of them rivals in one capacity or another, who show interest in developing some kind of standard. This looks like a legitimate effort on behalf of some great minds who really do want to make the social Web run more smoothly, but anything like this is going to take quite some time to overcome the roadblocks.
Despite the presence of some sharp folks on the project, the skeptical part of me wonders how this sort of project is ever going to win resources and priority from say, Facebook. Exactly how much of a rush are they in to make their db of user networks and user info available to other sites?
I don't know about the rest of you, but in my company's development queue, OpenID is not going to displace say, a Bebo App any time soon.
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