I just finished posting my first post over on the DataPortability Project Blog titled Redefining and Standardizing ‘Ownership’. The DPP Blog has been live since December and the guys have been doing a great job covering things that are important to the Project. Honestly, i haven't had the time in addition to all the other things i have been doing on behalf of the Project to blog, but this afternoon i went ahead (with some encouragement from the chat room) and posted my thoughts on the recent changes that Facebook made to their Terms.

The latest Facebook step (misstep?) occurred last week when they made some changes to their Terms of Service and one of the items of contention by many is the following statement:

“You may remove your User Content from the Site at any time. If you choose to remove your User Content, the license granted above will automatically expire, however you acknowledge that the Company may retain archived copies of your User Content. “

The Consumerist Blog posted on the subject yesterday and today many have been commenting. and facebook themselves have made public comments and started a discussion board to address questions from users.

It is obvious that as a community we need to redefine and standardize the way we define and award rights to ownership of data and this is one of the reasons that i am involved in the DataPortabilty Project [and currently serve as the Chairperson of the Steering Committee]. I realize that it has been common in the world of the internet to let 'Vendors' own what goes into their EULAs and TOCs- but we shouldn't continue to let that be. More thoughts over there.

Recently i had lunch with a customer that we had just finished delivering a taxonomy advisory project that focused on their 'retail employee' portal. I have known this customer for a while and the folks that work there are pretty tech savvy so of course during lunch a bunch of things came up in regards to the gadgets and tools we use in our day to day life and at work.

During lunch, one of them asked me a question that i had not been asked in a while- what was the "coolest and newest" application that i had been using and would recommend? After a couple seconds of awkward silence, I said that i really didn't really have an answer for something 'new'. In regards to services that i have been using more and more and find extremely valuable i mentioned things LinkedIn that have used for years (highlighting the new features which i love), SlideShare and Twitter (and Twitter apps) of course....but what else? We talked a little about the iPhone of course and even Facebook- but there wasn't anything i could point to that provided a great new service- especially for use by the enterprise user.

Today's post on the "Death of Web 2.0" on TechCrunch reminded me of that conversation. In that post, the author points out that more and more companies are not using the term as part of their pitch to get covered and and according to the Google trends analysis the author did it shows that less people are searching on the term. I have always used "Web 2.0" as a marketing label- not as a description of technology per say- so i wonder what are companies indeed labeling themselves? "Social Media" and "Social Networking" are probably used more and more, but what else?

So i still feel 'out-of-the-loop' so perhaps it is:

1. there is no new label like 'Web 2.0' to latch on to?
   
2. or maybe there just isn't a lot of services that are coming out that excite me?
3. i have my head in my arse?
   
4. the 'channels' that i am still dialed into are not doing their jobs and online coverage of new products and services are lacking
5. i don't know where to look [perhaps you can help me with this one?]
   

Lately, I don't find TechCrunch to be doing the same job it used to do in covering new services (there is too much drama lately maybe because i get suckered into reading stupid comments!). TechCrunch Enterprise which i had been waiting for since 2006 just hasn't gotten me excited as i wanted it to. i read other sites like ReadWriteWeb (a daily must read) and Mashable and the people i follow on Twitter are also invaluable to me to find new products services. But why am i just not that excited about most of products and services that they are covering?

Image|Flickr|An Era passed (record labels) by Olivander [i recommend visiting Flickr page]

Thanks to a connection i made at the She's Geeky Conference last month Judith Bush sent me a message on twitter this afternoon about the new xISBN bookmarklet that OCLC has updated and that now supports thousands of libraries. According to the announcement it will be updated on a monthly basis so if a library maintains up-to-date information in the Registry, its data will be automatically reflected in xISBN bookmarklet that has been installed by the user.

Is was only 12 months ago that i found this handy tool, and i can say that i have already probably saved hundreds of dollars by getting books from my local library that typically i would buy from the likes of Amazon. If i could find a combination of this and buying chapters and 'sections' of books that i would like to keep digitally for my digital devices like my laptop, itouch and 'dreaming of getting a kindle' - i would be in heaven!

So what does this Bookmarklet tool do? Here is an excerpt from my post on February17th 2008 on the subject:

So let's imagine that i am on Amazon.com and i am looking at David Weinberger's book 'Everything is Miscellaneous'. I don't have a Kindle so no easy download for me- and perhaps i am not sure i want to commit to having a copy in my book collection before i read it (well this book i actually do-and well marked it is!).

So before purchasing of Amazon.com, I decide to see if my local library system- in my case the Peninsula Library System (PLS)- has the book available. Clicking on the Peninsula Library Bookmarklet i installed- extracts the ISBN from the URL on the bookseller's page (Amazon in this example) and then goes to a library catalog and searches by ISBN.:
A search against the PLS Catalog shows me libraries in my Library System that i can borrow from that have the book in their collections. I can then cruise down to that location to pick it up, place a hold on the book if it is checked out, or put a request for interlibrary loan right from my browser. There are also many ebooks available from my PLS library system so i can get immediate access to those.

There are many things i love about the world we live in- one is the power of the 'user' (i have always been one for group protests and group advocacy!) and i personally think that it fair to say that Facebook's new announcement last night on Opening Up Facebook Status, Notes, Links, and Video to Facebook Platform is about the users and developers who represent the 'facebookers' demanding that their user data is 'open'- if no one was asking and threatening to go elsewhere as they find other great services they probably wouldn't be listening.

Looking back at the last year - Scoblegate was only 13 months ago!- there have certainly been a lot of steps towards the vision and mission that the DataPortability Project has been working towards and personally it is fulfilling to see these large vendors taking heed and listening to their 'users'.

These steps by the big vendors are quite important but also need to be reviewed as to what their end game is. Over on the DataPortability Blog, Steve Repetti one of the DataPortability Project steering committee members and a huge advocate of dataportability in his own products writes:

"On the one hand there is very little about this that is open. Facebook controls the data, its access, and its availability. Facebook defines the integration, they determine the protocols, and the APIs, and even who can and cannot use any of this. This “openness” is all under the oversight, control, direction, and whim of the giant."

I agree with Steve's sentiment that, "Facebook has made huge strides in extending its world beyond the looming walls of their garden" and i certainly look forward to hearing more feedback from the developers who will be working with the APIs over the next few days as to what is truly possible based on the APIs that have been made available.

Reading through some of the other commentary this afternooon, i love Dare Obasanjo's comment ' Facebook is now acknowledging that their users use other websites and integration with those sites doesn't require these sites to become sharecroppers on the digital farmland that is the Facebook canvas page. '-yep. the main difference is that the value of the experience will perhaps no longer need to be within facebook- and that is just one of the reasons that supporting data portability is valuable to the user and the ecosystem as a whole.

and two additional comments have to make...

1. i find it interesting that facebook chose to make this announcement at 4:54pm PST- when most of the world has called it quits for the day and many for the weekend as they go about their lives

2. i realize that this is a 'developer' announcement and that the general user doesn't care much for API related information- but shouldn't the facebook blog post an overview for what this means to the facebook "user"? You know that person that 'friended' you last month that is not involved in the tech scene- currently spends little to no time on other social networks sites being that they only recently got 'on board social networking' and because facebook was the first one they joined they have no idea what this all means about moving around their user data?

As i finished up my coffee Saturday morning before heading to the BART station to pick a fellow 'she geek' up to head down to day two of She's Geeky, a quick look at Techmeme reminded me of some of the important issues we had discussed the day before at the session about 'Making Information Accessible'.

That morning's two stories that caught my attention, was one on Google going 'bonkers' earlier that morning with malware messages on all the results and Ma.gnolia a social bookmarking site suffering major data loss and basically forcing them to shut down access to the site. [it is now Monday at 9:30PST and the site is still down with no message when you land on their pages which is disturbing. the last message is on their twitter account @magnolia]

In that session on friday we discussed structuring data for findability and reuse but we also went on a tangent about where the data is stored, who has access, who owns it, who can move the data etc.

This is one of the reasons that i got involved with the DataPortability Project early on and currently server on the Steering Committee as chairperson along with other roles. The project is addressing the issue of user data with the vision that "data portability enables a borderless experience, where people can move easily between network services, reusing data they provide while controlling their privacy and respecting the privacy of others". Issues of ownership, security and access to your user data are an important part of ensuring data portability for users.

So over the last few days, i have been thinking, would i pay for a service that took all my data from these various site i am adding value to and kept it secure, aggregrated and always accessible with 'one' click? (content created on services like Twitter, Facebook, Blogger, Flickr, Delicious, and on and on etc.) Yes i would. Stowe Boyd describes such as service at the end of his post on the subject.

and i just did a backup of my delicious tags- you never know...and fingers crossed for the mag.nolia team and users (i am one of their users but have over the last year mostly used delicious).

Image|Flickr|svenwerk