2008 Prediction Shaping Up

2008 Buzzword: Data Portablitly


...And it seems to be shaping up as such. This morning Duncan Riley tweeted up a storm hyping huge breaking news to come that would "change the face of everything." Ok, so it wasn't the Google is a woman, but it is that Facebook and Google joined the Data Portability Workgroup.

What does it mean? Well, while the gesture seems a step forward in a positive direction for reaching the now holy grail of the web-- an aggregated, portable social graph-- it will be interesting to see how this will all actually play out (my guess is we will be chasing this golden carrot for a few more years)...

But, no longer strapped by the conundrum of the "networks effects" theory of 2006, the Data Portability Workgroup is working towards establishing best practices for leveraging the tremendous potential of open standards which will bring us closer to the holy grail:


The DataPortability Workgroup is actively working to create the ‘DataPortability Reference Design’ to document the best practices for integrating existing open standards and protocols for maximum interoperability (and here’s the key area) to allow users to access their friends and media across all the applications, social networking sites and widgets that implement the design into their systems.
via TechCrunch

What this means for marketing should it gain traction and we see a massive movement towards aggregation and portability? Throw out your Facebook best practices :)