Data Portability Project: Understanding the Basics of Personal Data: Vendors, Users and You

Next session is Understanding the Basics of Personal Data: Vendors, Users and You.

Daniela Barbaosa and Chris Saad on the stage. They started data portability project together as co-founders 10 month ago. She works for Dow Jones and he works for Faraday Media.

Version 1 of the Web was the Document Web. Version 2 is the Social Web. They think the next web is the personal web. Data Portability as they define is, the ability to connect to, control, share and remix your personal data between trusted applications.

The inflection points of the industry.
- Standardized PC Architecture
- Windows: a standardized operating system brought a computer on every desk
- IP was the birth of the Internet.
- HTTP/HTML which gave birth to the web.

Next step is the standardization of data.

They are showing the data portability video.

Imagine owning and controlling your relationships where they follow your lead. Imagine controlling your calendar, images, video and content. Today, users participate in applications. We join applications. Imagine if instead, applications joined you. Imagine being able to synch your friends between social networks. Today, we share, we comment, we rate, but a user must sign up before being able to do so. The only two things that are unique to you are that they interact with your stuff and you make money. Rest is pretty standardized.

Vendors are hesitant about letting their "proprietary" data go. Data that vendors have isn't comprehensive and expiring fast. With data portability, you get more data, continuous data updates and reduced network fatigue.

They set up a project to crystalize and evangelize these efforts.

They were really no standards across the boards that were addressing data portability. No one was talking about data portability. Then they bought the domain. Then in January, Robert Scoble working with Plaxo scraped all his content from other social networks. That lead to a debate about privacy and security issues and about what users want?

Is it really possible? Yes, it is! It's already happening with OpenID, OAuth, XFN, APML, iCAL, hCal, XMPP, RSS, Atom, OPML etc. They are not creating a new technology, rather they are evangelizing formats.

There are a lot of open questions about security, privacy, who owns what, business models, user education, etc.

Daniela got involved because of the user education reason.

All the big vendors are playing including Microsoft, Google, Six Apart, MySpace, Facebook, Plaxo, digg, Yahoo! and LinkedIn.

Who cares about the big vendors? The dataportability project is an open, grass-roots effort. Anyone can participate. They have members all over the world. International privacy standards are different and they are continuously working on it.

They spent a lot of time working on the governance model. Anyone can join and start participating. They are based on an open participation model. Everyone will own it.

One of the deliverables in the future will be service provider grid where users will be able to learn more about what companies are using which open standards.


They want the data portability logo to become a brand.