A cluster of folks are working on the development of personal data stores (user data banks)
Paul Trevithick who has been actively building Open Source Libraries and Tools in this ecology for years. Most of it is in the Higgins Project under the Eclipse umbrella.
He recently wrote this post about what is emerging interims of a model for USER-owned/controlled/managed personal data/information including friending data, preferences etc. All the stuff you have on a social network today.
Creating the ability to do peer-to-peer friending (outside of any commercial silo like facebook, mySpace, Twitter).
Creating the ability for people to have a relationship with the vendors they do business with that they would like to share information with (this is the VRM concept - vendor relationship management as a corollary to customer relationship management)
Creating the ability for people to have relationships - connections to the organizations and groups of people they want to connect to. This could be "formal nonprofits" or just a local group of knitters.
I hadn't read this piece before, thanks for sharing. I have been following this conversation from a distance, and I did comment on Drummond Reed's blog when he brought up the topic of Personal Data Spaces. We've also had some dialogue going with Alec Muffett (VRM) about the Mine Project, which is mentioned in the blog post.
I do like some of the high level principles raised, in particular, the concept of an abstraction of apps, which also coincides, with comments TimBL made when the talked to the W3C SWXG.
(iPhone, Android, etc.), and good old desktop apps
I'm afraid my knowledge of some of the implementation details proposed, is not what it could be, so I probably could not offer much informed comment, but hopefully such technology stacks are things we'll all get to know better over the course of time, as the space matures. Sorry, I wont be able to make it to IIW, being based in Europe. And after Henry Story's horror story, I'm slightly put off booking flights specifically to attend conferences, but hopefully can learn more by following the various mailing lists.
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http://blogs.sun.com/bblfish/entry/7_days_in_sf_jail )