Ordinary people are both increasingly wanting more and more powerful applications to access their social data and are increasingly putting their most valuable social data in the hands of third-parties.
Developers and (some) companies are tired of lock-in to just one social networking site API.
Researchers could answer scientific questions about our social behaviour if they had access to the masses of social data currently spread throughout the WebLuckily, the building-blocks that allow us to open up these closed walls of data exist right now: all that is missing is a strategy for putting it together.
You may not be interested in strategy, but strategy is interested in you.Leon Trotsky
Or more specifically, your data.
OpenID is a way of a user "logging-in once" to a service provider and then having their log-in details be verified by a trusted identity provider.$ Your new OpenID username is a globally-unique URI:http://openid.claimid.com/hhalpin
Sound familiar?
Tim Berners-Lee: "The AWWW says that everything of importance deserves a URI. Go ahead and give yourself a URI. You deserve it!"
Built in support for desktop applications, mobile devices, set-top boxes, and of course websites.
OAuth prevents it by explicitly asking you if you want to let Facebook grab your details from the provider. While OpenID 2.0 providers (using OpenID Attribute Exchange) may hold general in$Enter FOAF and RDF?
The Open Web Foundation is an independent non-profit dedicated to the development and protection of open, non-proprietary specifications for web technologies.
Think Apache Foundation for open social networking.Allows people who work at major corporations to work on social software without worry of patent problems.

Seems to be making little technical progress...transforming into a user advocacy group.
On Steering Committee, only one W3C member has made an appearance, myself and John Breslin (DERI Galway, Ireland). The rest are smaller or start-up companies, primarily San Francisco-based.Have angered developers like Chris Messina of OpenID due their appropriation of their technologies without their explicit endorsement. He claims DataPortability.org also has really no significant interaction from major vendors, due to their no-baby killing agenda without any normative specifications or technologies.
Similar to "browser wars," there now are competing ways to share social graph data on the Internet.
Obviously a W3C-approved Semantic Web compatible standard way of doing this would be ideal.
Brad Fitzpatrick over at Google is working on using the hCard and XFN microformats to create and track identities.
Contact Finder follows relationships and indexes whose linked to whom...
Over at the Portable Contacts API, Joseph Smarr from Plaxo is mapping all the various contact APIs, from Microsoft Live Contact API to Yahoo Address Book API to Google's gData Contact API together...

The Linked Data Strategy version 1.0or, just publish all your data on the Web will not work for sensitive social data. What we need is Linked Data 2.0 that takes into account needs for privacy and access control.
We need will need to harmonize and even research solutionsin this area, such as managing multiple profiles, trust, security, deleting your data on command...
For example, the lack of portability does not imply a lack of privacy: the data of users may be data-mined and is all-too-portable, for it can be easily sold to parties unknown to the users without their explicit knowledge.


This insecure practice that can easily led to identity theft.
By forcing users to have their data spread throughout the Web under multiple accounts, users often just repeat passwords and user-names, leading to insecure transactions.Most of the work in this field is happening outside of the W3C, and furthermore, outside of the Semantic Web, despite FOAF being an early competitor. Let's bring everyone together in the W3C Workshop on the Future of Social Networking
The high level goal of this workshop is to bring together the world experts on social networking design, management and operation in a neutral and objective environment where the social networking history to date can be examined and discussed, the risks and opportunities analyzed and the state of affairs accurately portrayed. Based on the facts and a consensus-based industry landscape, plans for the future can be made by the industry participants. 15-16 January 2009, Barcelona
Position Papers Due Nov. 20th

Allows a much-looser and quicker moving forum than a Working Group for exploratory purposes, allows creation of a Working Group and recommendations to be "fast-tracked."
Serves as a forum inside the W3C to get diverse groups interested in this communicating, without patent restrictions so major corporations and non-W3C members can participate
Very transparent, with meeting minutes and mailing list will be open to the public..

Allow telecons, and a more orderly environment than the Semantic Web Interest Group
Would prevent relative nit-picking over ontologies to commence.Also transparent, with meeting minutes and mailing list will be open to the public..and yet no expectation to become a Working Group in of itself.
The two questions are:
One problem is without a patent policy we might inadvertently build a software patent into our standard.
Having a patent in supposed open standard that companies unwittingly implement is an instant business plan for troll.
For examples, see the conflict over XRIs (used in some ideas about data portability!) in the W3C, which led to the development of the W3C's patent policy.Royalty-Free might discourage both large corporations with huge numbers of patents from participating...but social data portability is only going to work if everyone comes to the table honestly and openly.
Unlikely that we can get organizations to commit to a single API (OpenSocial, Microsoft Contact API, Facebook Developer Platform), although this may be possible in mobile platforms.
Likely that we can create a common semantic and extensible meta-model (based on FOAF) that maps to the data existing APIs export.Unlikely that we can pass a single standard for privacy and authentication on the Web
Likely that we can get the W3C to support technologies like OpenID and OAuth, and follow a data-driven development model like HTML5.Unlikely that the W3C can produce a single monolithic technology architecture for the Social Web
Likely that we can produce a W3C Best Practice Standards (including accessibility) with three exemplary and compatible open source implementations that could be used by non-profit and educational institutions.

William Morris. A Dream of John Ball