After an avalanche of new members in the last week, including Facebook, Plaxo, Linkedin, Flickr, SixApart, and Twitter, DataPortability.org made a surprise announcement that Britney Spears would join the organization as chairman. She replaces founder Chris Saad.
Uhuh. Ok… Enough with the silliness.
Chris Saad, Chairman of the Data Portability Working Group, confirmed to me this morning that Microsoft’s David Treadwell, a VP at Windows Live,
will be joining the organization. Microsoft is expected to make a
formal announcement in the coming days. News first leaked out via a
shadowy post at Computerworld this morning.
Things are moving fast, at least in terms of support of the initiative. Next: results.
During yesterday’s keynote, Apple’s CEO, Steve Jobs introduced the Macbook Air.
It’s an ultra-thin and light Macbook. It has a 13″ screen, 1.6 Ghz C2Duo processor, 2GB of RAM, 80GB hard drive, full-size keyboard, multitouch touchpad, one Micro-DVI out and one USB 2.0 port. It’s an interesting product. But I wonder is where it fits in.
For use as a main computer it might be a tad limited. The processor is acceptable, as is the memory, but the hard drive might not be sufficient. Also I think one USB port is really not enough. I have two on my MacBook and I already have problems with that. Also, there’s no UTC network connector and no CD/DVD drive. There are ways around that (such as a USB CD player, or this new feature that is called remote CD or whatever), but still, as a main computer — I’m not convinced.
So, what would it be used for instead? As a travel mate maybe. It’s light, so you can bring it anywhere, to work, in the train, on the plane. Its battery life is acceptable (up to 5 hours, an hour less than my Macbook). But if it’s a laptop that you’re supposed to have just for travel, presentations, and generally, to carry around with you everywhere, then the price tag is a bit high (this baby costs $1799).
And if you want something to carry around with you, something you only use for presentations and while traveling, but not as your main work station, isn’t an Asus Eee much more interesting? For one it’s heck of a lot cheaper ($299), which also means it’s not as much of a disaster if you accidentally leave it in the train (not something that would happen to me of course *cough*). Sure it’s not as powerful (it has a 900Mhz processor, 512MB RAM, 4-8GB of HD space), and it’s much smaller (it has a 7″ display), but that’s the point. It’s a cheap device for on the go. It’s not trying to be a full-blown desktop. It’s pretty clear where Asus positioned it: as a cheap, ultra-portable device. Great for presentations, great for doing a bit (but admittedly — not a lot) of work on the go.
So I’m not all that thrilled with the Macbook Air.
It’s kind of cool:
DataPortability - Connect, Control, Share, Remix from Smashcut Media on Vimeo.
Remember about the dataportability workgroup I recently joined? Well, as it turns out, we recently got some new members.
Busy times ahead.
SIOC seems like a very interesting project:
Semantically-Interlinked Online Communities or SIOC is a framework aimed at connecting online community sites and internet-based discussions. Currently, online communities (boards, blogs, etc.) are like islands - they contain valuable information but are not well connected. SIOC allows us to interlink these sites, and enables the extraction of richer information from various discussion services.
The work I was going to do with OmniDrive (and their “dozens of partners”) on WebFS is probably never going to happen. I was a bit surprised by their last blog post about OmniDrive’s 1.0 release which states that “The new release will fully implement WebFS and will allow user to mount Gmail, Facebook, Flickr, FTP and many other storage endpoints and to make them accessible from a single point (and API)”, even though, as far as I know, there’s no WebFS spec at all.
Therefore, just before 2007 ended I decided to take WebFS to the data portability workgroup, a group of people promoting and working on standards to make set the user’s data free. Of course, this is what WebFS is all about and thus it seems a good fit.
I am now going to help some people in the data portability workgroup on a project that they had already started — WRFS. The Web Relational FileSystem (don’t worry — just a working title). Some information can be found here. It seems that they have been working mostly on a protocol for data discovery and linking that to the user’s OpenID. So, if you would log in to some WRFS-enabled web application using OpenID, you can instantly give it access to your data (such as pictures, documents and so forth) that you may have stored on other services.
The work I’ve been doing on WebFS is more about how to retrieve, store and manipulate data and data collections. So it seems our work will complement perfectly.
Today and yesterday you read about dataportability.org everywhere, because of mr. Scoble. Who was kicked off facebook for a while, because he used software to pull out all of his friendship information (his “social graph”). Of course, this raises data portability issues. He decided to join the DP workgroup too. Just now, the story broke that Chris Saad (the leader of the DP workgroup) has publicly invited facebook to join DP.
Things can move fast when they involve Robert Scoble.
I don’t care all that much about making social graphs portable, I care more about my other data. Anyway, I’m looking forward to actually making the WebFS/WRFS vision happen. To participate consider joining the public dataportability mailing list.
