Bubbling up, not taking up too much air, mindshare or time - Joseph Smarr, David Recordon, Kevin Marks, Chris Messina and others have been working on a standard to enable software services to import or export lists of people, called “contact lists” between disparate systems.

What’s makes this standards process different is that they’ve been conspiring with BigCos to get support - even as they were formulating the standard.  These APIs are already baked into OpenSocial Rev. 8. They’re basically what Plaxo - is.  They’ll be gateways to Microsoft Live Contacts APIs and ways for it to mesh into Yahoo, SixApart, MySpace, Bebo,  and all the other major players.

It’s a new way of doing standards - kind of lurking behind the scenes, short circuiting the long drawn out “viral” process - and kind of “cutting to the chase”.

I actually really like that approach to standards creation.

Look for something that is common - like “importing lists of names” and find the best solution for it - which is what Plaxo was doing, and then take that and give it away - which is what Plaxo (at least Joseph) did.  They’ve also come up with a ’standard’ schema - which is just fine - no reasont o argue abotu that anymore.

This is also what is happening with the category that Twitter invented and Identi.ca appears to be doing the exact right things in.  Change means going beyond teh interests of one company, and take into consideration the benefit of all.

And this best part is that this standard DOESN’T have a logo and barely has a web site. But it has working code and interoperability between Yahoo, Google, Plaxo, SixApart, MySpace and others - day one.

Last night they held a hackathon at SixApart’s offices, and coolio technology pivots were set up:

- one demo uses Kevin Marks home page as an ID Hub (which is what I call it) to create a series of contact and profile info export conversions - ending up as ‘exposed end points’.  They extract Kevin’s hCard (a microformat) info and transform it to vCard (an industry standard) using a Technorati API thereby creating a way for Kevin’s profile info and contacts list to be “addreessable” by APIs.Thuis is what’s called an ‘end-point’ - as it’ll be a persistent place in the web, at a particular URL - which can then be ricocheted or pivoted off of into memes, conversations, knowledge bases or practically anything else.

These Portable Contacts APIs are what I’ve been calling ‘two-way’ APIs - because Kevin can now write info INTO his hCard or XFN microformats - and any external web service can access Kevin’s info - and get it OUT - from anywhere.

- the other demo showed off using OpenID, oAuth and Portable Contacts APIs to connect a generic demo web site to Plaxo.  An OpenID account connects a member of the demo site’s profile account to a Plaxo master account (where one stores their master contacts list.)  They then use oAuth to request access to this master contact list, creating a safe, secure way form of dataportability.

Then today there was a day long summit where the final final spec was frozen and all the players met each other.  I couldn’t be there and our implementation is still month’s off, but I sure hope that interop betweeen these behemoths will start happening - soon.

We (BBM) still have to plug in our Facebook Connect and MySpace’s data availability - so we’re kind of behind the curve.

Google, Microsoft, Yahoo!, MySpace, Facebook, Hi5, Plaxo, Six Apart, Seesmic, JanRain, Skydeck, ShopIt, Current.TV, Interscope Records were all there today - and I bet that 20 otehrs will sign up - right quick now.  Then another 50 by October - and a virtual stampede after that.

Watch for huge benefits to end-users, bringing dataportability to real life.

This is the stuff that’s real.  Not startup contests, tracking VC investment rate or listening to the same blow hard brag about how smart and rich he is.

Serious kudos go out to all involved.  I’m dam proud of you.

The combination of the one year anniversary of the “Bill of Rights for users of Social Media” - and this Portable Contacts release really gets us started in this new school year’ - the right way.  Happy New Year ya’all.

The good news for Broadband Mechanics is that ALL of our client’s want it - so I think we’ll be able to demo benefits to end-users by Turkey Day.  That’s my bet.

The combination of a critical mass of PeopleAggregator networks - all participating in an open mesh - with this combined arsenal of open standards - which then gateway to the BigCo platforms - is what I’m talking about.

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 11th, 2008 at 10:51 pm and is filed under . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.