Chris Tomkins’ Blog

Just over a couple of weeks ago I wrote about my hopes for online services in 2008 and it looks like they may already be starting to come true. What I was looking for was data portability - the ability to be able to have a single login, a single profile, a single current status, a single set of contacts, a single set of photos, etc. etc. and be able to take them with me to whichever online service I wanted to use.

The DataPortability.org group was set up with pretty much exactly this in mind. I was a bit sceptical that it would come to anything initially as there were very few members but it looks like the big players are all joining up. So far there are representatives from Google, Facebook, Plaxo, LinkedIn, Twitter and Flickr - an amazing feat to get them all at the same virtual table I’m sure.

The first thing to come out of this, I think, will be more widespread adoption of OpenID for user login, probably as it is the simplest. There are already a number of sites supporting it (1,2) and some big companies talking about introducing it (read about France Telecom). If you haven’t already got an OpenID, then go and find out about it as I’m sure you’ll need one soon

I’m hoping we see lots more from this group in the future.

Still don’t get this whole thing about data portability? Then check out this video which explains it all.

Tags: Internet

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 16th, 2008 at 9:36 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.