Regarding data sharing it seems to me that what yoou are referring to is some kind of basic data-publishing scenario where I publish my blogs / photos / listings / whatever once then they get pushed out at my leisure to various other platforms. But….this is directly in opposition to the business plans of all the sn companies. I’m pretty sure newscorp isn’t too eager to help their users migrate to wordpress for blogging and flickr for photos. Also, how big is the user annoyance here? As long as my photos are on flickr I can link to them from anywhere manually today. I guess I’m not sure this is something that can be forced in terms of evangelism to the SN companies (thats kind of like selling thanksgiving to turkeys). Probably whats needed here are some kind of use cases that will make users demand data-publishing across SNs. And note, a lot of the stuff you are talking about here is doable today using widgets. For instance you can push your flickr photos over to any webpage using a widget. Maybe this doesnt fix long-term storage but I’d argue people will gravitate towards service providers who are stable and won’t go out of business anyway. Maybe S3 can have a consumer offering.

On identity however i’m totally unconvinced. Sure IN THEORY if I could have one username and password to log into all of my different sites that would be much neater than how it works now. But from a user standpoint, again, I think people would be very nervous if their account on linkedin was even tangentially linked to their myspace account. Remembering multiple name/passwords seems to me to be here for awhile longer.

We’re currently in a land-grab. My guess is that your vision will come to pass, but only after the boom-bust cycle takes effect and we get to a point where user annoyce is greater than the energy put into creating monetizable walled gardens by the companies. Whicch will only happen when the ad bubble bursts again and the market for startups stops valuing captive users so highly. I mean, end of day its a social problem not a technical problem, its solvable today without a doubt. But like your earlier effort (FOAF) I am a little doubtful that there is sufficient force pushing in the data-sharing and identity-sharing direction as opposed to force pushing to capture users in walled gardens. In a way it reminds me of what I used to hear from arrogant enterprise software companies about “our customers”. The same 500 customers, every arrogant enterprise customer thought they owned.