Online giants team up

Big internet players such as Google and Facebook have joined forces to try to create a consistent means of identifying and managing data across various social networking platforms, ZDNet reports.

Going by the name of the DataPortability Workgroup, the alliance has the grand objective of putting “all existing technologies and initiatives in context to create a reference design for end-to-end data portability [and] to promote that design to the developer, vendor and end-user community”.

Few! All a bit confusing, but in simple terms the end result of the project should be to allow people to shift their information, pictures, videos and contacts between social networking sites and communicate more easily with people on other sites – kind of a “one world” plan for social networking.

Representatives from groups such as Yahoo!, NineMSN and Dow Jones are already participating in the project.