Software Free

And we all stood back and applauded heartily as the giant knelt down and handed over the blueprints to his castle...what? you didn't applaud too?

Yesterday, Microsoft announced the release of Version 1.0 technical documentation for Microsoft Office 2007, SharePoint 2007 and Exchange 2007 as an effort to drive greater interoperability and foster a stronger open relationship with their developer and partner communities. They also posted over 5000 pages of technical documentation on Microsoft Office Word, Excel and PowerPoint binary file formats on the MSDN site royalty-free basis under Microsoft’s Open Specification Promise (OSP).

This is a good thing isn't it? It clearly demonstrates Microsoft's commitment to interoperability and data portability.

Not everyone agrees...

It’s a secret how much it cost them exactly, but Comcast officially confirmed it has acquired Plaxo, the social content and address book provider. What are the plans for the Plaxo within giant cable company and how will the lives of Comcast and Plaxo users be enriched?

Just curious, but do you think even though they are competitors, the top guns at MySpace, Facebook and Google spend all their time on Gmail chatting about when and how they’ll release the news of their latest endeavors to move towards data portability?

Or maybe they have spies in each other’s camps sending smoke signals home at night spilling the beans of latest plans to take over your data profile? Flashbacks to Pinky and Brain cartoons spill over into my daytime routine.

I have worked with technology long enough to have a feel for how change takes place. There are always approaches not so nicely dubbed putting lipstick on a pig that help bridge old ways with new results. Whether one respects such approaches, or not, finding a quick and dirty way to provide a new service using old technology is alluring. (Even if it's just the bars are closing kind of alluring. )

Many years ago, I developed screen scraping applications that allowed us to bring the green screen of CICS to the GUI Windows 3.1 desktop. It was a precursor to distributed desktop computing before the WWW. (Yes, there actually was computing before the WWW!) These same approaches are used today for mining data off of web pages, most recently for the purpose of creating Linked Data.

Danny Ayers take on Data Portability. Gotta admit it, I'm a real sucker for this kind of thing. Geek Rock - there is nothing better! Danny, I'll be your friend!

Excellent set of recommendations for Site Developers from the Data Portability project on how to unleash an individuals Web site data so that they can use it where needed, when needed.

Today I discovered a very interesting initiative. It is about Data Portability.

This might be the future for all websites and internet related applications. As a user, your profile, contacts, photos, videos and any other form of data is stored on the service providers servers. This means, for every website, you need to create a new login, invite all your friends manually to the service, upload your avatar and so on.

The next issue is, that you need to have some trust in the operator of the service, because he stores your password and other personal information.

Why shouldn’t it be possible to use a single login for everything? All your account data is stored and managed by yourself, so that the service providers don’t get hold of your personal information.

There have been some attempts in that direction, such as OpenID, but the Web needs alot more.