Web Worker Daily

There’s been a lot of discussion of data portability recently, much of it centered around the question of who owns contact information stored in various social networks. If you haven’t been following the discussion closely, though, you might have missed a vendor announcement of an actual portability API yesterday. It came from Microsoft, who now have a public (beta) API for Windows Live Contacts.

Using this API, developers can enable their users to view, invite, or update contact information used by Windows Live (with appropriate user permission). And Microsoft is also making things portable in the other direction: visit the Invite2Messenger site to bring your contacts from other networks into Windows Live. No doubt these solutions will continue to be refined, and we’ll have API battles for a while, but this is a concrete step that can benefit everyone.