Microsoft to join Web 2.0 data portability group, says source

Computerworld - Dataportability.org, the fast-emerging group that wants to make it easier for users to share their personal contacts between different Web 2.0 and social media services, has landed perhaps its biggest fish yet: Microsoft Corp.

Microsoft will officially announce its intention to join the international workgroup dataportability.org within a day or two, according to a source close to the matter.

Microsoft began talking to Dataportability.org soon after Google Inc., Facebook Inc. and Plaxo Inc. all announced their support several weeks ago, said the source.

The working group counts 60 members, most representing Web 2.0 firms such as Yahoo Inc., LinkedIn, Twitter and SixApart.

Microsoft would seem to be the odd man out, not being part of the tight-knit Silicon Valley fraternity as well as a laggard in Web 2.0.

However, Microsoft is a stealth social networking giant, with more than 400 million users with accounts at Hotmail, Windows Live Messenger or both, according to an interview late last week with Adam Sohn, a director in Microsoft's online services business.

And in social media, Microsoft is a major player. According to Nielsen Online, visit statistics from last August, 2 Windows Live Spaces and MSN Groups together make Microsoft the second-largest social networking provider, behind MySpace but ahead of Facebook and Classmates Online as well as Google and Yahoo's efforts.

"Most major applications will probably be touched by social features in the coming years -- and no one has a broader distribution of applications and data than Microsoft," said the source.

Over the years, out in front

Microsoft has also been early in other efforts to make social media services play better together.

For instance, it pledged last February to back the OpenID Web authentication standard, a move Yahoo! did not make until last week.

OpenID promises to let users sign on once and be authenticated to log in to multiple Web sites.

And last May, Microsoft loosened its group on its Windows Live application programming interfaces (APIs), including its Windows Live Contacts API, through which outside services, when properly authenticated, can connect and securely download contact data from Hotmail or Windows Live Messenger users.

Google and Yahoo offer similar authorized APIs.

Any service with fewer than one million users is allowed to use the Windows Live Contacts API for free. Larger services are asked to pay a fee of 25 cents per user per year to cover Microsoft's costs, though Microsoft will waive that fee for services willing to integrate Windows Live Messenger or a Windows Live Search box onto their sites.

Still, Microsoft remains dogged by an anti-social reputation. Last Friday, Fortune.com reported that unnamed Silicon Valley social networking firms were accusing Microsoft of holding its users' personal contacts data hostage as leverage for partnership negotiations.

Unnamed startups told Fortune.com that they had even received legal threats from Microsoft.

"This is a great example of why Google is the leader in the Net ecosystem and Microsoft is not," one 'angry entrepreneur' told Fortune.com. "Microsoft is the anti-data-portability company."

Sohn said that Microsoft had sent such letters only to companies that were bypassing its authorized API to "screenscrape" users' personal data.

Screenscraping, Scoble, and suits

Screenscraping involves services that log in to users' accounts at other services in order to take virtual snapshots of contact data such as names, e-mail addresses and birthdays.

It came to prominence earlier this month after prominent blogger (and former Microsoft employee) Robert Scoble was initially banned from Facebook after using such a service, Plaxo Pulse, to transfer his database of 5,000 Facebook friends to Plaxo in order to avoid retyping them.

Microsoft and Facebook may have hit a backlash by getting tough on screenscraping, but no social networking service condones it, according to Niall Kennedy, a San Francisco Web entrepreneur.

"When Google and Yahoo see this behavior, they're not happy with it, either," Kennedy said in an interview late last week, due to the threat of phishing-related data theft and invasions of privacy.

Snaring is caring?

Dataportability.org faces similar challenges convincing people that it is making data insecure for the sake of user convenience and choice.

"I have some issues with the [Dataportability.org] slogan -- Sharing is Caring. It's not caring if your 'friends' don't want their data shared and you do anyway," wrote Redmonk analyst James Governor.

Others argue that Silicon Valley firms embracing Dataportability.org are being too US-centric, failing to consider the tougher data privacy laws of the European Union.

Mozilla Corp.'s CEO expressed interest in joining Dataportability.org last week.

But many holdouts remain. MySpace, which is the largest social networking site, is the most prominent. Others that have not joined include IBM, which operates the SameTime IM/unified communications platform, authentication provider VeriSign Inc., and enterprise software vendors Oracle Inc. and SAP AG.