Indeed, OpenID — while important — is only one of a handful of Web identity and data “portability” efforts worth watching these days. (See sidebar.) What most of these would-be standards and approaches have in common is the goal of balancing the need for users to manage their identity, activity and content on the Web with the aims of companies to leverage that information to drive new business models, including more networked community sites and more targeted content, applications and advertisements.

Those goals have coalesced under the concept of data portability, which has come to mean “the ability to connect the data that I own, to control who has access to that data, to share that data with people I trust and to remix that data using various applications,” said Chris Saad, co-founder of the DataPortability.org working group and CEO of Faraday Media, which has created an application built on identity and content-sharing concepts.

DataPortability.org, which touts Facebook, Google, Microsoft and a slew of smaller Web players among its members, is working to pull together the mishmash of standards and formats and publish reference implementations and use cases to help drive the deployment of identity and data portability solutions, Saad said.

Data portability has become vitally important due to the Web?2.0 and social networking sites that — much more than Web 1.0 sites ever did — collect your personal information, connect you with your friends, and provide a platform for creating and sharing tons of user-generated content. The sum of this data — often called “the social graph” for its ability to represent a web of links and connections — represents the “secret sauce” driving the future of Web content and advertising.

Early efforts to leverage the social graph have been mixed at best. Consider Facebook's Beacon, which essentially used that site's social connections to share users' commercial activities and recommendations, at times without their explicit knowledge.

But there's no turning back as Web identity and social graph concepts lie at the heart of the future of the Web. The question for service providers is obvious: Where do they fit into Web identity and data portability, if at all?
Unlike Web players, which only now are getting into profile- and subscriber-driven identity management, carriers know who their customers are, where they live and much more thanks to their subscriber relationships. But while Web sites have long mined whatever information they can glean from users to better target content and ads, carriers have been limited in how they've used — and been allowed to use — the customer proprietary data they hold.
Marrying that data with the profiles in OpenID would be a huge step forward for OpenID — and the telecom industry, Washburn said.

“Everyone who's paying attention recognizes that the telephone is the one piece of technology that no one is ever willingly without. Clearly, that makes it the platform on which identity most powerfully works,” Washburn said, adding that “there could not be a more fundamental, important intersection” than the linking of Web and carrier identity. That said, only one service provider — France Telecom's Orange — has taken real steps in exploring that intersection. Last fall, Orange became the first carrier to act as an OpenID provider (at openid.orange.fr), offering the service to its 40 million subscribers.

Most carriers have opted, instead, to pursue identity as part of their IP multimedia subsystem service strategies, a path that doesn't necessarily connect with Web-based OpenID and other Web-driven data portability efforts. For its part, the OpenID Foundation has yet to actively recruit service providers as participants or board members — though that is coming soon, Washburn said.

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