With the rising interest in, and use of Social Networks (FaceBook, Plaxo et al) there is growing unease in what those sites are doing with your data, never mind the inconvenience of uploading all your data every time you join a new site.
Enter Dataportability.org a site whose philosophy is:
As users, our identity, photos, videos and other forms of personal data should be discoverable by, and shared between our chosen (and trusted) tools or vendors. We need a DHCP for Identity.
An eminently laudable aim. See more about their aims on this quick video.
http://www.vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=610179&server=www.vimeo.com&fullscreen=1&show_title=1&show_byline=1&show_portrait=0&color=
DataPortability – Connect, Control, Share, Remix from Smashcut Media on Vimeo.
The video was put together by Michael Pick and I came across it via Marjolein Hoekstra.
Update: Marshall Kirkpatrick has posted about this video now on Read Write Web.
Laudible yes but we need to see some implementation. Talking about it will just lead to arguing about it. Flickr should “Just do it” and YouTube should “Just do it” and so on. We don’t need a charter to start this, we all know the general right formats to use and can begin to implement.
I’m hoping DP.org isn’t attempting to reach a perfect consensus before the first lines of code are written.
@Paul M. I agree. Anyone can have laudable intentions. http://segala.com/blog/what-is-the-dataportability-group-going-to-deliver/