Big story of the day was the announcement by Data Portability Group that key individuals from Google, Facebook and Plaxo have joined the initiative. If you are new to DPG, here is the quick summary of their mission:

Our Philosophy: As users, our identity, photos, videos and other forms of personal data should be discoverable by, and shared between our chosen tools or vendors. We need a DHCP for Identity. A distributed File System for data. The technologies already exist, we simply need a complete reference design to put the pieces together.

Our Mission: To put all existing technologies and initiatives in context to create a reference design for end-to-end Data Portability. And, to promote that design to the developer, vendor and end-user community

In short, its a key initiative to bring some order to the contentious issue of user data ownership.

User needs to be in the driver seat here. Having leading social media vendors definitely helps in putting focus on the problem. This should result in actual adoption as well. Also this announcement should make users aware of the possibility of reclaiming their data and associated social graph.

At the end of the day we are all users and we all have concerns about who owns the data, who is sharing it and how can we reclaim if the trust is misused.

At MessageDance, we believe we can not only bake our architecture with some of these emerging ideas, but also start releasing to users in small increments. We have design in place for the complete data export which we will be sharing with our beta users very soon.

As we continue to work towards our vision of connecting all social media outlets and building email-based message portability solution, we will be tackling data portability issue as well.

If you care about data ownership issue, I would recommend you visit Data Portability Group’s website and join the discussion at Google Group.