Sean Ammirati: Okay. So on today’s ReadWrite Talk, I have Chris Saad, the co-founder of DataPortability.org. Chris, can you start by telling our listeners who may not be familiar with Data Portability, what it is?

Chris Saad: Sure. No problem at all. So Data Portability and the Data Portability projects specifically. It’s intent by a group of us to give a name or something that’s been happening for quite some time. Over the last four or five years that’s been these standards group, they’ve been creating various pieces of technology that are open standards and interoperable and that have made possible for users to do parts or all of their APMLs.

But these things are little lacking of names or a piece of story or sort of best practices for how you came about stitching it all together. And so the Data Portability project is designed to tell that story just kind of shine a light on that community and recommend best practices to develop it.

Sean Ammirati: Okay. And for people who may not be familiar with you, can you just get people a little bit of your background before founding Data Portability or co-founding it?

Chris Saad: Well, I’m one of the many Web 2.0 CEOs out there. I’ve got my own Web 2.0 start-up. Before, I was involved in interactive radio. My start-up is all about attention and the attention economy and I also have to co-create something called ‘attention profiling markup language,’ which is one of those open standards that are out there. This one’s particularly focused on how you store your interests and move it from service to service.

Sean Ammirati: Okay. I do want to get into APML a little bit. But I guess to start out, you founded DataPortability.org with some other people in November of 2007. So it’s been about six months and you recently released your six months strong report.

For people who may not have had a chance to read that yet, what are the high-level things you have accomplished in the last six months?

Chris Saad: There was actually a broad range of them. The very first deliverable that probably most people are aware of is the fact that we delivered the phase one of the road map, which is to get everyone probably done that very successfully. I’m sure that most of the listeners have heard of Data Portability by now, the Web 2.0 conference is pretty heavily focused on Data Portability. And I myself have been going around the world actually speaking about to VC, to tell them what startups to look out for and things like that.

So that’s one of the key deliverables we’ve had. We started to tell that story to make it top of the mind to make sure that the standards groups are able to keep up and get their message heard.

The other key deliverable we’ve had is to gather a governance process and a road map to guide our work. As I mentioned, stage 1 was promoting the idea. Stage 2 was researching and outreach. Stage 3 is developing best practices, and stage 4 is evangelizing those best practices. So we’ve mapped our road map out. We’ve mapped a lot of our governance model out. We have to go from a hundred to a thousand participants in the space of two weeks, so we have to handle that scale.

And the mark we definitely reached, we started the first draft of our best practices for the technical people. So if you imagine our deliverables as really recommendations to the community, we’ve actually first draft of those for a couple of the use cases. So that’s quite a lot of progress over those six months.

Sean Ammirati: I think that’s sort of a help for framing for people. So I think that kind of touches on gathering your governance process in putting it together. But in your mind, I guess what’s in scope and what’s kind of out of scope for DataPortability.org as a working group?

Chris Saad: It was probably easier to talk about what’s in scope. The primary use case we’re trying to solve at the moment is the portability of personal data between trusted application and services, typically consumer facing applications. So social networks and applications around the periphery of that. And that would include your personal details your friends list, perhaps your images and data around that.

We’re going to avoid initially verticals like health care, financial data, and gaming data, for example, and enterprise data as well. So for now, our use case is really how do you take what’s happening at the moment when you’re asked to add your friends one by one or you’re asked to give them a your username and password for Gmail and it scrapes data out and you have no control of what happens to it. There’s no update in synchronization process. We want to make that particular piece that’s occurring a lot right now safer, easier and more secure, and ultimately more rewarding for the user.

Sean Ammirati: Okay. Which is good. So using that as a use case, I guess one of the things that people have pushed back I think at the Data Portability group a little bit, you kind of even touched on this a little bit already, is developing the narrative.

I don’t think anybody would say you haven’t done a good job. If you went to Web 2.0, you couldn’t miss people talking about Data Portability and handing out Data Portability stickers and such. But the skills to sort of pick technical best practices may be different than the skills to develop narratives. What do you say in reaction that sort of people who push back on that front?

Chris Saad: Do you mean the difference between the technical and the PR messaging side?

Sean Ammirati: I guess in the sense that maybe the skills and the people who should be working on those might be different and, therefore, maybe the concern when you move from, you know, phase 1 of developing the narrative to the second phase you touched on where you’re going to research different approaches and sort of then the third phase, pick the best practices.

I think there’s a case to be made that although you’ve done a great job developing the narrative, some people might be concerned that it’s a different set of skills that you need to pick the best technical solutions.

Chris Saad: One of the key tenets of the project is actually to invent or reinvent as little as possible or, in fact, nothing. So it’s actually the standards groups themselves who were doing much of the technical work. And we are simply telling the story around that. Some of that story is, in fact, sort of PR messaging. Some of it is technical and some of it is, let’s say, policy and user experience.

In terms of whether the group is technically capable of doing such a thing, it’s actually 1,000 to 1,500 participants in a group. We’re ranging from marketers and media people right through to Christopher Ireland who invented SSL and people who invented various technologies such as APML, OpenID, all those sorts of things.

So it’s a very broad cross-section of people and those who are interested in technical aspect are doing technical stuff. There are those interested in policy stuff for example, Creative Commons people, Oasis and the Electronic Frontier Foundation and a whole bunch of participants who are involved. So each of them are working towards to their skill set and solving part of the problem. And they grab a heading toward the action groups that fit these particular skills.

Sean Ammirati: Okay. And that’s very helpful. So when you’re talking about the standard groups are doing most of the work, are you talking about groups like the OpenID Foundation or what would be an example of a standards group?

Chris Saad: For example, the XRI group. But particularly, they’re involved as well and they do X-RDX and that sort of thing.

Sean Ammirati: Right.

Chris Saad: The microformats community, there’s the IDF community. Another great example of participants are the W3C are very involved. They send participants in their group to do RDF.

Tantek for example, at our last meet up, helping us to design the microformats pieces that would be involved. There’s people who OpenID community. There’s people from XMPP community. So each of those standards groups are participating in the conversation and they’re helping to clarify the technical narrative while others are off doing the messaging narrative, or the policy narrative or the user experience best practices.

Sean Ammirati: Cool! I think that’s a great answer and I think it’s a part of the story that when people are getting nervous, they sometimes overlook. So, sort of, to wrap up before the second part of the interview where I want to talk to you a little bit more about the marketplace and its reception to Data Portability.

I guess to, sort of, sum up, you’ve done these things in the last six months. How would you finish this sentence, "If we don’t do ____ in the next six months, I won’t be happy"? How would you fill in that blank?

Chris Saad: That’s a great question. So if we don’t deliver a fairly solid set of best practices, particularly technical best practices preferably the early versions of the policy and user experience best practices as well, I would be slightly disappointed. It’s a massive group with a really important and broad problem domain. So I’m extremely proud of the group so far. But I think we’re well on our way to delivering a good and comprehensive first draft of our technical best practices.

And so an example of what that might look like, is a document or a set of documents that explains how one would implement, let’s say, logging in, discovering what services a user uses, how you would authenticate against those services, how you would expect to get certain of those data back, and perhaps how you would go about updating that data.

And I would say we’re well on our way to doing it already. And I think if we haven’t ratified at least some of those drafts and I’d be surprised.

Sean Ammirati: Great! Well, we’ll look forward to seeing, at least you’d be at that point of six months then Chris. So now, I do want to shift for the second half of this interview to talk just a little bit about the marketplace. Because as you even said, it was a big theme in that Web 2.0. No doubt. It certainly was a big theme at SXSW as well. So let me start by one of the, sort of, big events at Web 2.0 was the John Battelle Mark Andreessen interview.

And John pushed Mark a little bit on when would Ning be enabling some of this different Data Portability functionality. He commented that in his opinion, it was more developer-demand than user-demand at this point.

I don’t know if you saw the interview and you saw that exchange, but I’m sure you’ve heard about it. What’s your reaction?

Chris Saad: I did not actually see that particular interview, but the idea or the sentiments that the early adopter community is interested in this and perhaps the mainstream isn’t is not an uncommon one. I think the early adopter community are, in fact, the influencer of community. And it is our job to look ahead and be somewhat of the canaries in the coal mine.

And I think one of the best canaries in the coal mine is Robert Scoble. Say what you will about him. And I think he’s a great guy. He pushes the social applications so that people find out what it’s like. And he often breaks them 6-12 months before anyone else. And I think when he went to synchronize his frame between Facebook and Plaxo, he came across the use case that many end-users would be wondering about but not quite be able to put in some words right now.

And you see that demand from developers building Facebook apps and the reason they do that is because they want their apps to just work and get access to the social graph without having to reinvent it from scratch. The problem of course, is that once you do that inside the sandbox like Facebook, that might work for certain types of applications. You end up building the sandbox. You end up very much limited with what you can do.

So what we’re looking to do is encourage this idea that applications on the ultimate platform of all, which is the Web, should have just as much cohesiveness and interoperability as the Facebook app does in the Facebook environment. I don’t know if end-users will be at the gates calling for Data Portability. What they will be doing is they’ll be starting to experience really simple, friction-free use cases where they’ll be able to use their data or share their data between two services, and then the light bulb will go on and they’ll increasingly wonder why they can’t do this between other services and application.

If you told people a number of years ago that users will be demanding 802.11, you would be laughed at. But users don’t demand that. They demand Wi-Fi at Starbucks. So nothing we say would be true. You know, users don’t demand, you mark up your web page into HTML. They demand a standard page to load in their browsers and enter correctly. So it’s this balancing act that always comes up where early adopters are called crazy for demanding something because it’s a technical solution. But really what they’re asking for is a simple, friction-free user experience at the end of the day. And I think users will be looking and appreciating that.

Sean Ammirati: Yeah. And you, kind of, referenced what I’ve heard now referred to as Scoblegate at this point.

Chris Saad: Yeah.

Sean Ammirati: That clearly put you guys on the map from my perspective as I’m maybe a bit less closely tied into this. I’m sure other people were aware of you well before that. But since you kind of touched on that a couple of times, can you just quickly explain what happened there and just tell that story quickly?

Chris Saad: Absolutely. As I mentioned the wonderful thing about Robert Scoble is that he is the early adopter of early adopters. He looks at things from a very, very end-user centric position. And so he wanted to do a very simple thing that wasn’t a technical thing in it, there was a user experience that he wanted to synchronize his friends between Facebook and Plaxo.

And that was a very important thing for him. He has 5,000 friends and he didn’t want to be keep on re-adding into the services. Now, the argument is are we ever going to have 5,000 friends at the end of the day? So what he did was he ran a script that Plaxo provided him and it was a test script.

And what had ended up happening was that he tricked the auto protection code on Facebook. It thought that it was a spammer or screen scraper, which it actually was sort of was. And it kicked him off and obviously leaving him stranded from 5,000 friends and his Facebook functionality. And that was… And Robert Scoble being who he is just had to blog about that and he was an enormous story. Of course, Facebook reinstated him.

But what happened was, as a result, he joined the Data Portability project to try and help us work through and solve that, that particular use case and drawing all the enormous amount of attention to the problem and also the fact that Data Portability was working to solve it.

Sean Ammirati: Right. And actually, Facebook ended up joining the Data Portability project as well, correct?

Chris Saad: Yeah. Well, we invited Robert publicly the project and he accepted publicly. And so we thought it was only fair to invite Facebook and other vendors to join in the conversation.

Since they were getting quite of a negative press about it, which is not our goal to by any means sow negativity around. So we invited Facebook publicly to join the project to help us work through this problem. Because whether you think what Robert tried to do was right or wrong, the use case itself is definitely needs to be solved. And so Facebook accepted along with Google and Microsoft and Plaxo and Digg and SixApart and many others.

Sean Ammirati: Right. Which clearly got you guys a lot of publicity really early on. And I heard people push back maybe too much publicity early on. What’s your take on that?

Chris Saad: Yes. It’s an interesting dilemma. You can do a lot of work in the vacuum or in the corner and quietly solve these problems. And I think that has been done really, really effectively for the last five years or more. The technology standard have been incubating and they have been discussed and debated in this very technical community very effectively.

And to some extent, it’s time for these communities to come out of the shadows and have this public message for Data Portability has been giving them. Our goal though from the beginning though was to really to get these big vendors to endorse or to sort of support or sign-off on what we’re doing. It was never about these vendors. It’s always about the grassroots. So to some extent, their participation was a bit distracting, particularly from the messaging point of view because people assumed we were all about the big vendors and they would somehow corrupt the process.

But that is not the case. And I have strived very, very hard to go up and close the community down and build governance and small groups. We actually optimized. We’ve opened it up and it’s almost like an experiment in radical transparency now. And the individual consultant has just much say as the people from Microsoft, for example.

And if Microsoft was in them, I’m picking on them, but as they are not pulling this. But if they would have been dragging their feet or if some large company would derail the process, it’s an open forum. So people would be very clear about that and we would be able to see it. So I think the net result was positive. I think we put it on the map, but it is important for the community to see beyond that. I say that it was interesting as far as the hype and from one of the group and the goal of the group is to deliver these best practices.

Sean Ammirati: Right. I actually want to get to some of those groups that existed before they were doing that work in the background. But there’s another point that I can’t help but bring up right now, which is you’ve mentioned Microsoft and Facebook. And I want to get your take on some of the big vendors. So Marshall Kirkpatrick, another writer for ReadWrite Web and probably one of the guys I enjoy reading the most although I like everybody at ReadWrite Web, but interviewed Mark at SXSW.

But Mark commented, which was kind of what he closed the interview with that, "We are philosophically aligned with the Data Portability movement, but we’re pushing it our own way to make the world a more opened place. It’s going to be good when it happens."

But he sort of push us back about some of the privacy concerns through the interview. I guess if you were a tsar for a day, let’s start with Facebook and I want you to take on a couple of other big vendors as well. What would you do at each of these big companies, starting with Facebook, to get them to better support some of the narrative that you started with Data Portability?

Chris Saad: Okay. Well, I think what I would recommend to those companies is embodied in the Data Portability best practices. So I would encourage everyone to go to DataPortability.org and click on the ‘For Developers’ channel. And on the right, there’s a link to technical documentation. And that would be my recommendation to them, is to look into that.

And this comes up regularly from specifically from Facebook that some privacy somehow antithetical to Data Portability or the word ‘privacy’ is often brought up to cast dispersions on the process or writes questions. And I don’t believe that it’s a zero-sum game where privacy needs to give way to Data Portability or vice versa.

And I think with a level of common sense and with the checks and balances that we’re building into the architecture, that privacy will be not an off-shoot, but it will be dealt with and dealt with in the only way that it can. I’m making it analogous it to Wi-Fi. Just because you can’t connect to a Wi-fi. hotspot doesn’t mean that you choose to. And when you connect, it doesn’t mean that it’s a free flow. It means you may need to put in your password and username to grant permission and various things. And that’s very much analogous to what we’re doing.

There are some edge cases where it really feels based on the panel discussion that I see coming from Dave Morin and others at Facebook, that Facebook is trying to become this walled garden of privacy and security over Data Portability. The point of differentiation is privacy rather than portability and operability. And that seems to be the consistent message coming from them.

That’s fine. They can certainly choose to go down that route. And they like to highlight certain educators like if you publish something to a news feed and if that would be an RSS, and an aggregator picks it up, there would be no way of revoking it. And to me personally, I don’t really think that is a problem. That’s just the reality we’ve had since the blogging days.

And, you know, Facebook is more than happy to import RSS and, therefore, understands why RSS works and why it’s not a privacy concern. So I think it’s just the matter of user education and vendor education and ultimately building the best practices and privacy is not being ignored. It’s certainly part of the problem and that we’re trying to solve or the opportunity which I’ll explain.

Sean Ammirati: Okay. I will make you go through the lessons that each of them should look at the Data Portability best practices. But let me give you a list of vendors and I’d like to know who you think is doing the most to support Data Portability from their product perspective in the least: Microsoft, Google, Facebook, MySpace, out of those four, who would you look at sort of the company who’s maybe most onboard and who’s the least onboard?

Chris Saad: I can tell you who’s most engaged with me and the project and is most communicative and helping us to tell the narrative. So I would say probably the most high-profile move to be made by Microsoft, and that’s surprising to a lot of people. I regularly e-mail with Microsoft in the highest levels and when they released their contact API.

They mentioned the Data Portability project and they work there, which is helpful to the entire industry. Because by mentioning their moves towards openness in the context of the Data Portability narrative, they’re clearly signaling their intention to follow through with that road map and to make it part of a broader story. So I’ve been very, very pleased with Microsoft.

A lot of people wouldn’t expect a lot from MySpace because they are not actually officially part of the Data Portability project. But their VP of platform or technology is actually a co-founder of Data Portability, Ben Metcalfe. So Ben and I have been speaking to them at the highest levels. They’re very, very aware and very switched on the idea and have a lot of various things coming along. Kevin Marks from Google is always at our functions, totally gets it, very supportive and very supportive. We are also very supportive of their Opensocial work as well in return.

So they also get it and they made less moves as mentioned that working in a public statements. But I have to be very appreciative with Kevin’s support and Brad Fitzpatrick as well. Unfortunately, Facebook is the least communicative, but I know that he mentioned privacy and all the panels. And as I’ve said, they were always more focused on the social contract they had stood up in there in their walled garden or in their platform, I should say.

They’re more interested in their social contract. And their social contract is more about absolute and total control of the data rather than interoperability of data. So I’m sure things will changing as our best practices mature and there’s still plenty of room to move.

Sean Ammirati: Cool! Okay. So gold start for the guys in Redmond. That’s somewhat surprising. [pause] So let me close with this because you’ve mentioned a couple of times that, obviously, the Data Portability movement is not saying that started in November of ‘07.

But it really is built on a lot of technical work that’s been done for a long time. And that’s not unusual on the Web. A lot of these initiatives are build on top of each other, right? So a final thing I think would be interesting to get your take on is, what are some of the things that you think most made it right for the Data Portability movement to be ready for a narrative that would go directly to the consumers, people or projects initiatives?

Chris Saad: That’s an interesting question. And I would say like any of these things where they seem to struck a chord and seem to get overnight success. It’s usually a confluence of events. Right time, right place, right message, right people.

And I think that’s all true. So the project really had the right people involved at the beginning. That was thanks to us working with APML, you definitely got a really great group of people and some additional people came onboard to start the project. We saw a gap in the marketplace, which is that there were a lot of great standard works going on. But people seem to be missing the bigger picture, so that was again the right time.

Because the technology was maturing but they haven’t nowhere come along to tell the narrative. So we started telling the narrative. We have the right people tell that story. The marketplace and the vendors were ready for it because people were dealing sort of social networking fatigue. And, therefore, we were looking for an answer.

Robert Scoble had the right problem at the right time. We’ve had the infrastructure in place to solve it or at least hold the composition.

And again, the technology is mature enough. And actually the name is also descriptive. It speaks more to the solution than it does the problem and it speaks to more of an end solution rather than solving the part of the problem. So, for example, if you’re talking about identity, it feels like this ethereal thing that people didn’t quite know what identity is sometimes.

Obviously, technologists have struggled with it for a long time and started to define it. But the end user don’t really know what their identity is. And so you got the personality, you know, what clothes you wear or does it mean your username and password. But users do know what data is and they do know what porting it means and they do know what it means to not be able to port it. So when you combine identity with data, with user control, the privacy where you end up with is effectively Data Portability. And it’s the main pocket to a solution and I think that was the right time and place for that as well.

So it was a confluence of things and it’s been a great and gratifying to be involved with it. It’s really, all credit must go to the standards groups that came before and the participants that have been working day to day in the forums and chat rooms who were actually solving the problem. I just get to be a very visible cheerleader for them.

Sean Ammirati: All right. Chris, I appreciate you being a cheerleader today here at ReadWrite Talk and thanks for your time.

Chris Saad: No problem. Thank you, Sean.