This is all fluff. From what I can see, the DP guys have nothing right now, but a bunch of logos. Nothing.

Willis is exactly right. The real angle is how can so little generate so many TC stories.

Headline reminds me of Joaquin Andujar’s famous utterance: “There is one word in America that says it all, and that one word is, ‘You never know.’”

Wonder if joining this “effort” forces anyone of the participants to do anything - any time soon. Except for a PR.

I am sure they would want to limit what you can take away

yupnup.com

I will believe this when I see it.

My theory are they are all just jumping on the bandwagon, because they look stupid and narrow minded if they don’t.

When these big boys actually meet to “discuss” portability, they will all just sit there and stare at each other, except google of course because this is about opening social graphs and google is trying to break into that (yeah, I know about orkut).

They will then issue warm and fuzzy group hug press releases, which TC will right about as great progress.

Wills and Steve, this group has to start somewhere. So what if they don’t have any standards or products yet. Isn’t it enough that they are working on one of the biggest problems on the internet?

I’m expecting a little more from this article, especially after the last sentence.
Don’t count on it.

Why not? You know, for arguments sake …

@Robin Yeah Agreed. This post is a bit disappointing considering the length and breadth of information available now on the project’s goals and methods.

DP is total hype based on a good concept/idea but as you Americans once said “where’s the beef” - it is a bunch of non-business focused techies - Saad, Messina, Forrester etc. creating noise in the blogosphere.

The reality is the commercial companies who are joining will do very little other than to slow this idea down until they can create a new competitive advantage.

Can somebody explain to me what is so important about data portability? It’s good for users, sure, but it seems to be total fluff for businesses, and I’m guessing most of them will see it that way when it comes to actually implementing most of it.

It only benefits the companies who have small market share, and therefore want to lower the barriers to entry. i.e. Microsoft, Google, Yahoo in the social networking space. But when it comes to the key players, they have absolutely no interest in anything other than lipservice.

For example, imagine advertisers being able to pick up their entire AdWords account and transfer it from Google to Yahoo - do you really think that’s going to happen?

@Wills, I completely agree. I have made the same comment before, DP is all fluff and seriously short of content. The site is littered with acronyms disguised as content. My guess is companies jumping on to appear open but since there is no substance to DP, there is nothing to worry about.

It’s like being a snail with a shell full of your data with u

I can kind of see both sides. It’s a cool idea for sure, but not a revolutionary one. It’s mainly cool from a coding standpoint right now because it has fun potential, but until this and OpenSocial really get some more accessible faces and/or UI on their voodoo, not many people are gonna care a bunch.

Like Carlton said, you gotta start somewhere. Plus, even though Googs doesn’t want to open up adwords to Y!, it WOULD make sense for Plaxo and Y! to have ‘trusted’ status and then be able to more freely pass user info…

For DP, given today’s API’s from providers left and right, what’s left to be addressed? OAuth is upcoming but not here yet.. and RDF is not getting attention.. so DP needs to tell the world very precisely and concisely what the problem is, and how the problem is getting addressed by the DP WG’s.

and DP’s position (and existential value proposition) with respect to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Data efforts.

yet another standards production machine

This is bad for online capitalism.

It is just over 10 weeks since the DP group was formed and most members have joined within the last few weeks, I think they need a bit longer time to produce something.

Oh come on, we all know M$ wants to get in to sabotage the standard with committees, bribes, strong-arming, and every deceptive and unethical behavior known and unknown yet.

Hey, that´s the way we have learnt to love them.

I agree, we should at least give DP a chance, there is some good people there, they are being open to anyone who wishes to add their support/comments/advice/ideas …. sounds great!

DP does sound like fluff tho but comparred to open social which is more smoke and mirrors, than substance, it may have real legs. It really depends on the brains in these organisations, afterall they know people will find a source for exploiting the walled gardens data. And, when that happens, they will rush to buy the exploiter. But anyone really serious about data cionfidentiallity will not let the genie out of the bottle. It is a massive subject and reflects the future of the internet in it’s current format.

After all it is our data, our friends, our connections. Google gears has the potential for the right idea along the correct lines. And when people wake up to the real power behind these massive corporations, the ad revenues will tuble like the current stock markets.

Lesson, better do it right or loose the game.