by Brian Solis

Good friend Chris Saad, Chairman of the Data Portability Working Group, confirmed that Microsoft’s VP at Windows Live David Treadwell is joining the organization. In a few short weeks, the workgroup has already experienced incredible momentum.

Marshall Kirkatrick over at ReadWriteWeb has the full story.

Earlier this month, we reported that Plaxo, Facebook, and Google had also joined.

In a previous statement, Saad offered insight as to why the major players in social networking and social computing were jumping onboard, “Their joint support of the DataPortability initiative presents a new opportunity for the next generation of software – particularly in the fields of social software, user rights and interoperability. The DataPortability Workgroup is…actively working to create the ‘DataPortability Reference Design’ to document the best practices for integrating existing open standards and protocols for maximum interoperability. This means users will be able to access their friends and media across all the applications, social networking sites and widgets that implement the design into their systems.”

Marshall asked an important question, one that has been widely circulated by a few, very vocal critics such as Dennis Howlett.

Is the group all talk and no action?

Saad’s reply, “”There’s tonnes of beef – all the [contributing] standards groups have done excellent work already. We’re just helping the mainstream catch up.”

Saad also pointed to the group’s timeline, titled A list of significant events leading to a Data Portability enabled Internet.

I’m putting a link here to Digg Marshall’s story because I think this an important issue to share.

If you can create an extended and portable social graph, then people can truly leverage the cultures and relationships across multiple networks. That’s the power and promise of social media. Think about the world economy and what it would be like if there were no air travel, bridges, roads, etc. It’s about building global communities that help people discover and share across multiple communities and also feel compelled to share their social graph with their hosts.

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