Content Management Matters ™

It’s a secret how much it cost them exactly, but Comcast officially confirmed it has acquired Plaxo, the social content and address book provider. What are the plans for the Plaxo within giant cable company and how will the lives of Comcast and Plaxo users be enriched?

The OpenID initiative garners an enormous boost (to the tune of 248 million identities) as the addition of Yahoo! brings the dream of 'one person, one password' a big step closer.

Starting January 30th, Yahoo! members will be able to use their Yahoo! identities to sign in to user services at other OpenID 2.0 Web resources.

Okay, so you've heard the news right? A-List blogger Robert Scoble gets kicked out of Facebook for running a new Plaxo beta script that scrapes his “Friends” (name and email address) from Facebook and inserts them into Plaxo, only to later be let back in.

Should Scoble be allowed to get his data out of Facebook in the format he chooses? Is it even his data to begin with? Does the data belong to Facebook’s? Is it yours? Who owns your data anyway?

There have been concerns about privacy and safe management of user data since day one of the social networking phenomenon.

Unfortunately, these concerns have been buried underneath the fascination with the exploding popularity of sites like Facebook and MySpace.

There are many projects and initiatives aimed at safe and innovative ways to allow users to take their personal data with them. But consensus was that until one of the larger players in the social networking got involved, these initiatives would be little more than wishful thinking.

It is amazing how quickly consensus can change as Google, Plaxo, and Facebook announced today that they would contribute to the Data Portability Workgroup.

While I am hesitant to say "today could be a very important day in the history of the internet" like Marshall Kirkpatrick did when he broke the story on ReadWriteWeb, I do believe there is much to be excited about.

That is, if you believe that social networking is more than just a passing fad.

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.