Facebook has joined Google and Plaxo in becoming a member of the DataPortability Workgroup, a group devoted to best practices for open software platforms and data portability between those
platforms. 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.
Plaxo's Joseph Smarr, Google's Brad Fitzpatrick and Facebook's Benjamin Ling are all set to join the DataPortability Workgroup as representatives of their companies.
It's especially encouraging to see Facebook, a company that has yet to embrace an open access network like Google's OpenSocial, to join an organization devoted to interoperability between platforms.
The DataPortability Group essentially wants what consumers want -- to allow users to access their friends and media across all the applications, social networking sites and widgets
that implement the [group's reference design] into their systems. Facebook should be congratulated for embracing open standards and data portability.
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