This morning at that OSCON conference David Recordon of Six Apart will announce on stage the formation of the Open Web Foundation. The new foundation is about providing a home for the development and ratification of web-related standards efforts. The foundation will be focused on developing the technical specifications of protocols used for communication and inter-operability between applications on the web. The foundation will also set out the legal terms and best practices for the use and transport of both private and public data, and the usage of web services.

We first reported on the announcement on Tuesday of this week after Chris Saad, the co-founder of the Data Portability project wrote a post about the announcement. The Data Portability project is focused on the evangelism of data openness and transparency, while the new Open Web Foundation will be focused on implementation issues.

Yesterday at the F8 conference Facebook announced their support for the new foundation, and we have learnt that Google, MySpace, Six Apart, Plaxo and many others will also be supporting the new initiative. Google and Facebook now have an appropriate venue where they can resolve their differences and work on a standard way to have their users interact with each other between the Facebook Connect and OpenSocial platforms. The web foundation also provides the technical details, as well as policy details, on how such a relationship between companies and products could work.

Currently there is not much more at the Open Web Foundation outside of a lot of strong backing, a lot of strongly willed organizers and a lot of initiative. The foundation hopes that within the next few months after the announcement today they will be able to release their first set of work on data standards and formats.

These include implementation and improved support for XFN and hCard, which help other sites access information about your friends on Digg. The site has also added RDF to make its pages more semantic web friendly.

Digg joins Facebook, Google, Plaxo, Six Apart, LinkedIn, and Microsoft in its welcome decision to support DataPortability. But one has to wonder where its enthusiasm for the related OpenID movement has gone.

In February 2007, Kevin Rose said that Digg would begin adopting OpenID by the end of that year, but we haven’t seen any action on that front. Let’s just hope Digg doesn’t remain in the wrong camp for much longer.

In February, Red Hat sent a cease and desist letter claiming trademark infringement over their Fedora logo. Instead of fighting Red Hat in court, DataPortability simply held a new logo competition and announced the winner last week.

With that behind them, the group has been focused on drafting technical best practices guideline and getting community feedback.

Today, though, the new logo has been challenged as well – this time by Vivendi Mobile Entertainment’s trademark agent, who claims to be “very surprised to notice your new logo for Dataportability which is very close and similar to their logo.” They add:

The mere comparison of the two signs is self-explanatory and we are sure that you will understand that our clients could not leave you to use such a logo in relation to identical of at least similar services.

Vivendi is using their mark in connection with a service called ZAOZA, a self-described “simple and fun architecture that permits the legal peer sharing of exclusive and quality content.” They are demanding that DataPortability immediately stop using the logo.

Dataportability co-founder Chris Saad says they aren’t going to fight this challenge, either, because it’s too distracting to their core mission:

We’re going to speak with our lawyers, tweak it slightly and move on. These C&D tactics are really disappointing and counterproductive… We’d really rather everyone focused on the Technical Best Practice Drafts we released last week.

Once again, the lawyers get their way. Full letter is below.

http://www.docstoc.com/docs/wrapper.ashx?doc_id=531052&swf_url=http%3A//content1.docstoc.com.s3.amazonaws.com/4074_001.pdf.swf&showrelated=0&showotherdocs=0&showstats=0&enableFullScreen=1
Sample Trademark Logo Infingment Letter – Get more documents

In addition to the glory of seeing the logo on all official DataPortability Websites and letterhead, the winner will get an iPhone, a week’s worth of free ad space on TechCrunch and CenterNetworks, and a bunch of other donated prizes.

DataPortability wrangler-in-chief Chris Saad has an update here on the six-month-old effort to create standards that will allow consumers to take their personal data with them from site to site.

The fledgling DataPortability workgroup, led by Chris Saad, had a bit of a panic attack in February when they received a Cease & Desist letter from RedHat over their alleged use of the Fedora logo.

Instead of fighting it in court, the workgroup decided to ditch the old logo and hold a new logo contest instead. The winner would get a lot of attention, and a number of blogs and startups threw in prizes of their own (including us).

The competition is now in its final stages, and it’s ready for everyone to vote on the logo they like the best. The public voting begins on April 15, at 12pm (PST), and ends on Friday, April 18, at 11:59pm (PST). Get more information about the contest here, and vote here.

We’re hosting the site with Media Temple but have no financial stake in the organization. Special thanks goes to Fred Oliveira and his team over at Webreakstuff for their work on the site.

It’s definitely FriendFeed month in Silicon Valley. The company, founded by ex-Googlers, let you aggregate information and activity streams from all of the various services that you use on the internet – Flickr photos, YouTube videos, blog posts, delicious bookmarks, Twitter messages, and other stuff (33 services total to date). Your friends subscribe to your stuff, and see a stream of data on their home page coming from everyone they follow.

The site also allows users to add content directly, comment on information and, more recently, added an excellent search feature that is still sorely lacking in Twitter. The site is more than a list of feeds that can be re-exported. FriendFeed wants to be a destination site, too.

And their growth is very strong, given that the service only launched publicly a month ago. The number of users was growing 25% per week earlier this month.

Last week the site announced the availability of an API, which allows third party services to easily add in FriendFeed data and features. The first batch of these applications are starting to be released now.

The Centralized Me

But there’s something just a little weird about FriendFeed, some people are starting to mumble. It’s an aggregated “me” but it sits in a centralized site (in fact, centralization is kind of the point). FriendFeed is a (and hopes to become “the”) Centralized Me. It’s a data silo. True, it’s a friendly data silo, with APIs and RSS feeds to move some of the data around, but it’s ultimately housed on their servers, and always will be.

Loic Le Meur sort of summed it all up tonight in a blog post where he says that we grew used to having a Centralized Me in the days before all these services popped up, starting in 2004 and spreading since then. That Centralized Me was the blog. Then we grew used to having a Decentralized Me – your stuff was literally everywhere. Go here for photos, here for the blog, here for videos, and here for bookmarks. Robert Scoble today is sort of the quintessential Decentralized Me – his stuff is everywhere, and he seems to love the chaos.

What Loic wants, and I think other people will want it too, is a place that they control where this information is aggregated. That may be right back at the blog for some people. For others it may be Facebook (who understands this fully). Wherever a person considers their home turf is where they’ll want all this data.

FriendFeed can become that place, but it’s an uphill climb. So many other services have already become the psychological home of their users. Changing that is like swimming upstream.

Is Data Portability The Anti-FriendFeed?

The Data Portability Project may turn out to be the answer that people are looking for. And it may turn out to be a sort of anti-FeedFriend. The whole point of Data Portability is to get social networks talking to each other and exchanging user data, with their explicit permission. Want to add your flickr photos, twitter messages and YouTube Videos to your blog? Data Portability is working to help make that happen through consensus driven policies and procedures. In essence, data portability embraces the Decentralized Me, but lets users re-centralize it wherever they please.

Frankly, not enough people know much about DataPortability yet. That will start to change, as founder Chris Saad is starting a road show presentation to talk at a high level about what he’s trying to accomplish. Some big partners are joining, even if just in spirit so far.

Ultimately, Data Portability is to the Centralized Me (all your stuff) as OpenID is to identity (your literal identity). And just as the big players are sort of supporting/exploiting OpenId to maintain their user accounts, they will also support/exploit Data Portability to remain the place users consider the Centralized Me.

Serious politics and power plays are coming. What I’m wondering is if FriendFeed can get big enough fast enough, and get enough users to think of it as their Centralized Me, to be in the game.

That’s exactly what they’re doing. Third parties are lining up to donate prizes, and an iPhone is already on the list. We’ll throw in a sponsorship spot on TechCrunch for a week for free, too, and point to the winner’s website. Whoever wins will have the thanks of a grateful community, and likely a lot of new business coming their way.

RedHat says:

Red Hat, Inc. (“Red Hat”) recently became aware that on your website, located at http://www.dataportability.org, you are using art work that is identical to the Fedora Infinity design logo owned by Red Hat. Specifically, I am referring to two images on your site: the green and white logo, as well as the blue and white logo.

Both logos contain the symbol for infinity. They are above are above for reference.

What’s my opinion? I agree with Marc Canter, who writes in an email to DataPortability cofounder Chris Saad, “Do NOT spend 0.001% of your mindshare – time – or energy – worrying about a LOGO! Get a different logo.”

The DataPortability Workgroup is an important step in the evolution of social networks. The ideas are what’s important – the logo is irrelevant. RedHat should have just let it go, but you guys can’t waste mindshare on this. Have a contest and let fans create a new logo for you.

Don’t count on it.

Google and Plaxo joining are a positive, however given that both have previously joined together for platforms such as OpenSocial it’s not that significant, but Facebook is another matter. On January 4 Michael sort of defended Facebook’s stance against Plaxo pulling data from Facebook on the grounds that “Facebook also has a very good reason for protecting email addresses – user privacy.” Today, by joining the DataPortability Working Group Facebook is embracing open standards and open access, and that is a huge fundamental change from its previous stance on being locked in to closed standards.

I spoke with the head of the DataPortability Group Chris Saad prior to this post (Chris is also the CEO of Faraday Media.) After about 24 hours of correspondence, the following are to join the working group as official representatives of their respective companies: Joseph Smarr (Plaxo), Brad Fitzpatrick (Google) and Benjamin Ling (Facebook).

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.

There has been no shortage of people who have knocked Facebook for their closed standards prior to today, perhaps many of whom had a legitimate point. Today Facebook has taken the first step towards open standards and data portability, and despite those previous gripes they should be congratulated for it.