Content Management Matters ™

Just curious, but do you think even though they are competitors, the top guns at MySpace, Facebook and Google spend all their time on Gmail chatting about when and how they’ll release the news of their latest endeavors to move towards data portability?

Or maybe they have spies in each other’s camps sending smoke signals home at night spilling the beans of latest plans to take over your data profile? Flashbacks to Pinky and Brain cartoons spill over into my daytime routine.

In either case, it’s been a busy couple of weeks with Facebook announcing Facebook Connect, then last night Google previewed Friend Connect. Now we read all about MySpace’s “Data Availability” initiative – not to be confused with Data Portability – which allows MySpace members to share their public profile with websites of their choice.

Is this the year of the “User Identity Battle”?

Responding to the growing success of Facebook.com, the social networking titan, MySpace.com has retaliated with an announcement that they will be unleashing the MySpace Developer Platform.

The platform, which is slated to be released as a test next week, will allow developers to integrate games, media-sharing features and other programs with the site - not unlike the way developers have been able to share their programs via Facebook.

Just when you thought every possible niche had been served, Kansas-based Waxx Inc. unleashes Skywax.com on an unsuspecting world. The service offers free web design and management of the web construction process from start to finish, but only for bands, djs, and other musicians.

For "legit" print journalists, the day of reckoning may be approaching more quickly than any of us would like. A survey by web CMS vendor Polopoly reports that, according to European newspaper execs, 40 percent of published content will be user generated.

In the next three years.

Because of this, blogs and other "new media" commodities will become increasingly critical to the news-making populace. And with this trend, personalized online advertising opportunities are also expected to improve.

When Facebook opened its back-end to outside applications in early spring, it gave users the power to act on preferences for how they'd like to interact with others.

Suddenly, you didn't have to wait until Facebook felt like offering you a functionality; you could just code one up yourself and disseminate it.

Though it's been around since 2002, contact management and social networking site Plaxo was seemingly lost in the shuffle as competitors like MySpace, Facebook, and LinkedIn have risen to prominence in recent history.

Not content to sit on the sidelines, Plaxo hopes that, by embracing OpenID for identity management and microformats for information exchange, they can catch up to peers currently dominating the social networking landscape.