Digg Joins DataPortability Working Group (Plus Related Resources)

Digg made a post to the company’s blog this morning announcing that they are officially joining the DataPortability.org Working Group. Digg follows Facebook, Google, Microsoft and many other companies in getting on board to discuss protocols that will make it easier for users to move their data from one site to another while still protecting their privacy.

The company posted more specifics about its embrace of data standards than almost any of the other participating companies has. Read more below, plus check out some related resources that we hope you’ll find useful.

“Digg already supports many of the open standards that let you use your data on sites other than Digg, including RSS, OPML, and hCard,” wrote Digg’s Steve Williams. “We use RDF to embed the Creative Commons public domain dedication into each page. Just this week, we added MicroID, a Microformat that lets you prove to other services that you own your Digg user profile. Well be adding more open standards, such as OpenID, APML, OAuth, and XFN, in the coming months.”

It’s been almost a year, though, since Digg announced that it would support OpenID and there’s been no tangible movement on the protocol yet. None the less, it is encouraging to read that the company is looking to implement things like Attention Profile Markup Language (APML) and Open Authentication (oAuth.) Those are cool.

In addition to the DataPortability.org Google Group, here are some other recent resources you might find valuable.

Additional Resources of Interest

DataPortability.org has begun issuing monthly progress reports detailing the work they are doing. It’s an attempt to respond to criticism that it’s all just talk – sounds like a good idea.

Scott Kveton, chair of the OpenID Foundation did a wonderful podcast interview with Phil Windley earlier this month about OpenID and data portability in general. Whether you’re familiar with these issues already or not there’s lots to learn in that interview.

Niall Kennedy made a very good post last week titled Data Portability, Authentication, and Authorization that describes best practices in getting access to user data from one site to another. Hint: it’s not about asking people for their email user name and password! I’ve been referencing that post a lot lately in conversations.

Interested in only part of these discussions? The DataPortability.org Google Group is quite active, too much so for many companies only partially engaged in these issues. Much better you be partially engaged than not at all. If you’d like – here’s some RSS feeds for that discussion filtered down to some particular topics. Feel free to subscribe to them.