Portable Social Networks

How can social media be open?

Why does every social network ask you to re-enter all your personal information, like name, birthday, occupation, etc? Why does every social network let you re-add all your friends? Why do you have to set your privacy or notification settings on every social network seperately?

Simple: because there is no open protocol yet to exchange data between these system. It's called a portable social network, and we need to decide together how it will shape the future of online networks forever.

Facebook and Twitter are leading the way showing how social media can be open. OpenID is a burgeoning standard that can be used for single sign-on as well as moving user’s data between systems. Microformats are paving the way for a structured web. Come meet some of the movers and shakers helping to create portable social networking.