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After months of competing platforms, privacy showdowns, arguments over who owns your social networking data, and something called “Scoblegate,” a huge announcement from the DataPortability Workgroup today: Google, Facebook, and Plaxo are in. What does this mean? From the announcement:
“… Users will be able to access their friends and media across all the applications, social networking sites and widgets that implement the design into their systems …”
In theory, this completely changes the social networking landscape. Entrepreneurs and developers can now develop applications that live externally of any one social network, that leverage the so-called “social graph” you maintain on your community of choice.
In practice, all three of these companies (and presumably the many other big players that will now be forced to join) are currently major competitors, so it is to-be-determined how open things will really become for those of us on the outside.