Data portability and the news business

The news about Facebook joining the DataPortability Workgroup rippled out from CES like a shock wave today. As Duncan Riley noted in his initial TechCrunch post, the move could “allow users to access their friends and media across all the applications, social networking sites and widgets that implement the design into their systems.”

As an active social networker, I find the notion of moving seamlessly from network to network very appealing. Much more exciting, though, is the idea of building applications that can work across the Web in many contexts, not limited to just one site.

Like many news organizations, we’ve experimented with Facebook apps — and we’re working on a major project that has deep integration with Facebook as a major feature. But generally speaking, newspapers have been slow adopters of social media applications for the collection and distribution of content.

Maybe — just maybe — today’s news will begin to change that…