>> With social networks containing so much personal data, which is inevitably available to others, I have to wonder whether making all this data portable is necessarily a good thing...

"All this data" is voluntarily submitted by the end user. If it ends up being a "bad thing" that will reflect poor judgment on the user's part in having disclosed that data in the first place. I welcome the idea of portability as long as I'm in control of the data that gets fed into my online profile.

for those really interested on whats happening .. the groups is here

http://groups.google.com/group/dataportability-public

No surprise that Google would join this as they've made user data fairly portable from the beginning.

Facebook's joining is a joke, unless they plan to make some serious changes in how they operate (I won't hold my breath). But maybe the bad PR is starting to get to them, along with a decline in their numbers since mid December.

Google didn't join this workgroup,someone who happens to work at Google did. The same workgroup also includes people from Yahoo, Microsoft (ninemsn), MySpace.

Ionut
Ah, just like employees of Google, Yahoo, etc. are members of the OpenID Foundation (not QUITE the same,membership is open). But it doesn't mean Google or anyone else is fully embracing OpenID. Well, at least not right NOW anyway.

Even though the most portable piece of personal data in the "cloud" is still plain old email, it's nice to see smart people working on the rest of it. Yay, programmable CRUD* internets!!

*Create Retrieve Update Delete

actually Ionut has a good point " Google didn't join this workgroup,someone who happens to work at Google did"

There has been no offical announcment by Google or FB for that matter of fact and the group that I point out is NOT an official google group.