Live blogging from the DataSharingSummit
I’m reporting to you live from beautiful Richmond, CA - in the middle of no where at the DataSharingSummit. Lots of great things are being talked about, including:
- Google has asked what folks want in terms of Social Media APIs….
- And Dare Obasanjo wanted everyone to know that Microsoft respects everyone’s personal data, will give them control over it and that it is shipping Open APIs (which you can use to import and export) profile info and data from Windows Live Contacts - which is part of the Windows Live platform. That 20B relationships across 260M accounts.
- Randy Farmer of Yahoo has suggested that Jerry Yang’s 100 Day report will have a significant aspect of openness…….. well lets just say - Jerry is paying attention.
- Meanwhile AOL has promised that AIM is going to open up further and will be positioned as a way to……… [And AOL is buying everyone dinner!]
- Oh yah - Google is also talking about using Google’s ID system and would that be a good thing. I told him - YES!
- Clearspring [who is buying everyone drinks at dinner] is looking for nice, simple ways to federate and connect widgets together. Its the essence of the distributed web - interconnected widgets.
- While both Brad Fitzpatrick (now at Google) and David Recordon (now at SixApart) are here talking about the notion of an open, shared database of social graphs. David demoed some coolio examples of what happens when you can leverage XFN (using Plaxo’s coolio new online identity consolidator) and just sort of ‘walk through’ your various social graph paths. It was TOTALLY coolio.
- Speaking of demos - Leah Culver of Pownce showed off some APIs to access their friends service. She’s also is working on a full set of APIs (stay tuned.)
- And the folks from Higgins showed two demos: a Social Network portability demo - utilizing Higgins’ IdAS (Identity attribute service) . That demo is available at: Cloudtripper.org They also demoed their new “Community Dictionary Service” which is at: http://cds.idschemas.idcommons.net (which is basically a mapping service.)
- Rapleaf insisted that they do NOT expose of sell people’s email addresses and why they in fact collect email addresses - at all.
- David Fox of theAstrologer.com is asking for more granular user control over their birthrate information - like date of birth [month-day-year] and time and location of your birth - for their astrological matching web service.
- There’s talk of a consolidated, standardized EULA - so we can all sing from the same hymn book
- and my old buddy Brad DeGraf showed up and is talking about Interra - a financial system for empowering consumers to support causes with their buying loyalty. [This org is co-founded by the founders of Visa and Odwalla.]
- and distributed, interconnected social media apps
- and there’s lots of talk about privacy concerns, use cases, use cases and even more use cases - and registries of non-profits.
- some folks talked about working on an open source XRI validator
- and Bill Washburn introduced the OpenID foundation
- we have folks here from Canada, UK, Spain, Denmark, Austria, Australia and Korea - so we have the International angle covered. Ive even started talking to some folks in London about a DataSharingSummit there in December.
- and MOST of all - there’s discussion of the inherent conflict between business interests (which want to keep their users ‘locked in’) and providing open access to those users - who can move their data - wherever the hell they want to!
- its all about data sharing and we’re having a summit - wish you were here!
- Big Shout out to Kaliya Hamlin for facilitating the whole affair
- and her buddy Laurie Rae - for helping out
- tomorrow we’ll cover Interop testing (among other things)
- and now we’re all gonna go have dinner on AOL and Clearspring.
Finally - there was a session on the ‘Bill of Rights‘ we put up. Many people are calling it naive or whatever- so I think its important to say this “obviously nobody cares about what users have to save” and “demanding our rights may seem fairly ‘idealistic’ and naive” - sure fine, I’ll admit that it’s naive. But it’s important that we say it. At the end of the day “the people united will never be defeated” (El pueblo unido jamás será vencido)
September 9th, 2007 at 9:39 pm
“more granular user control over their birthRate information”
Thanks for the mention, though that would actually be “birthDate”
Great event Marc, thanks for being one of the key people to make it happen.