If you look at the homepage here, you will see that there is a ‘leave a comment’ link for each post. However, if you click on the title of the post and go to that post’s own page, the comment box is visible at the bottom.

If that’s not clear, email me your blog’s address (my email is on the ‘About…’ page) and I’ll take a look.

Thanks for stopping by and commenting.

Keep in mind that at this stage Data Portability is idea rather than an existing, ready to use technology.

I’m not an expert on data portability but I think, in a perfect world, it might let you:
- sign up to Orkut
- Orkut would automatically fill out your profile based on information you have already agreed is available to be used for profiles
- Orkut would ask if you would like to import details of your Facebook friends into Orkut
- Orkut would then search those contacts to see if there is anyone from Facebook also on Orkut

I don’t think there is anything that would let you interact with Orkut friends from Facebook without joining Orkut, although Google’s Open Social platform for developing apps (like you find in Facebook eg chat, iLike and so on) might allow you to interact with your friends through those apps.

It’s still all very much up in the air at this stage. Hopefully in a year or two more things will come together to make this happen.

I do have to say that I think you guys are doing good work and I look forward to the day that DataPortability is mainstream.

Personally, I don’t expect people – the ordinary consumer – to care about DataPortability just yet. We are still in a research phase, and the next phase will be a design phase, followed by an evangelism phase. It will be that final phase where the benefits will be articulated.

I think to myself about RSS, when I was explaining to some guys at my firm in the m&a team. When I told them about having a personalised newspaper, where the information comes to you, their eyes popped out. Some other people, after I explained RSS to them, are now addicted. As people that understand all these open standards, we know they are cool stuff (otherwise we wouldn’t be using it ourselves). We just need an effective way to communicate that to the non-technical people. People can’t say you don’t need something, if you don’t know it exists.

Once my damn blog gets back online, check my most recent post which explains what I think DataPortability is. I am sure it will still raise questions, but I also think it will give you some perspective as well.

Thanks for stopping by. I was wondering if anyone from the Data Portability Project would come across this.

I agree with all your points, and I concede that perhaps I haven’t been asking the right questions. Data portability is important and I’m not questioning that.

My wife never gets phished. She’s more aware than most (in my experience) when it comes to recognising what’s a scam and what isn’t. Part of that is living with a geek I guess, but she is also switched on and a natural sceptic.

I honestly don’t think she’s concerned if a company collects data on her and then tries to sell stuff based on what they think she likes. I suspect (but I would have to confirm) that she likes the idea of a more personalised service.

Finally, she works from home running a small and private music teaching studio. However, I don’t think the broader implications of OpenID concern her that much. She has already been trained over the years to create multiple logins for different services. I suspect that OpenID might seem like ‘a good thing’ but whether she could be bothered to setup an identity, I’m not sure.

Data portability is important but I don’t think the negatives of lock in are effecting enough ‘normal’ people yet. I still believe that until it does, most people who shrug their shoulders and say “So what?”. I don’t envy you your struggle. It’s going to be a long haul.

Two other things (so the finally above was not all that accurate after all…):
- every 90 days? My corporate network insists on a new password every 30 days, which often leads to unsafe password practices like the same word with a sequentially changing number at the end. Personally, I think the network would be more secure if they just tested the strength of a password and then changed them less frequently
- liako.biz is returning blank pages in FF2 and times out/server not found in IE 7 and Opera. Not sure if it’s a server problem or operator error.

Ask her if she likes companies tracking what she does online, and then selling what they thinks she likes (that’s alleviated by APML where you can get a copy of what a company thinks you like).

And if she works at a large company, ask her if she remembers her windows password, network password for VPN, Lotus Notes password, and her intranet password – all of which she has to change every 90 days. (That’s fixed by Openid – a simple identity credential).

http://liako.biz/2008/04/what-is-the-dataportability-project/