Several companies and workgroups are working on data porting, data (network and profile) sharing and standards. One of the more interesting development on the social side of the issue was the publishing of the “Bill of Rights for Users of the Social Web” last week. The Bill of Rights asserts that users of the social web have certain rights, including:

Ownership of their own personal information, including:
- their own profile data
- the list of people they are connected to
- the activity stream of content they create;
Control of whether and how such personal information is shared with others; and
Freedom to grant persistent access to their personal information to trusted external sites.

Sites supporting these rights shall:
- Allow their users to syndicate their own profile data, their friends list, and the data that’s shared with them via the service, using a persistent URL or API token and open data formats;
- Allow their users to syndicate their own stream of activity outside the site;
- Allow their users to link from their profile pages to external identifiers in a public way; and
- Allow their users to discover who else they know is also on their site, using the same external identifiers made available for lookup within the service.