A storm-in-a-waterglass gathering more and more momentum, dataportability.org welcomes new members. Before they were heating up the storm, now individual corporate representatives of Scoble, Plaxo, and Facebook, are sitting on one virtual table.

As announced here, blogged here, and then slashdotted, people working for some interesting ventures have today joined dataportability.org.

In the last weeks, for those who missed the event that Robert Scoble used an un-released app "pulse" from plaxo to gather his contacts from facebook and got blocked by facebook after this. He contacted them and after a while, was back in, but the problem is obvious: social websites, and the companies running them, have one capital on their stock: data created by us. As "we" were "man of the year" in Time, the data of such a celebrity is worth a lot.

Scoble joined dataportability.org (DP) and blogged this, which made me curious to also look at their site and add a few notes about how RDF and Semantic Web may help them out instead of creating their own standards.
Now that people working for Plaxo, Google, and Facebook join the already impressive list of individuals at dataportability, they can really talk about the mission
To put all existing technologies and initiatives in context to create a reference design for end-to-end Data Portability. To promote that design to the developer, vendor and end-user community.

My biggest fear was, that the standards created by DP were used-less as no big companies were present in their board (not like W3C, where nearly all big companies are onboard). This has changed now and I would expect that the effort indeed now is relevant to the future of the web.