Google, LinkedIn, Six Apart, Facebook and Flickr have now all joined the Data Portability Working Group.

Data Portability Working Group claims as users, our identity, photos, videos and other forms of personal data should be discoverable by, and shared between our chosen (and trusted) tools or vendors. So we need a reference design to put these pieces of information about ourselves together.

It might be true that we would benefit from this kind of assembly of information. Much convenience can be expected. But how about our privacy? It might be also true that our all-round information would become accessible to some unknown parties without our approval. They may even intervene in our social networks, because they know who are our parents, our best friends, our loves,... What a horrible life then!

www.ning.com

Incorporate many applications in a customized website that you can keep private or share with a community.

Interview: “We created Ning to give everyone the opportunity to make their own social network for anything. This is a really powerful idea, and we are finding that it is even more so in practice. ”

For Digital Storage and Remote Access

www.omnidrive.com

Storing content online couldn’t be easier than it is with this drag-and-drop tool. Edit, share and publish documents with Omnidrive, even if you or your users don’t have the software to open said documents.

 For Online Desktop Applications

www.goowy.com/index.aspx

Includes email, contact manager and games, this service gives you an email address that you can access from your online desktop. Easily customizable, you can incorporate a lot of cool applications into this one platform.

Interview: “We wanted to bring desktop like functionality such as dragging and dropping, context sensitive right-clicks, keyboard shortcuts and a greater overall level of interactivity to the world of web mail.”

For Virtual Office

zoho.com

Includes Writer, Spreadsheet, Show, Wiki, Virtual Office, Project management, planner and chat feature. A complete office experience in one, users can take advantage of all or some of Zoho’s features.

Their pitch:

"JotSpot was founded in 2004 as the first company to provide an application wiki."

• This site lets you create a free wiki for your business, or pay for one that you can open to the public.
• The wiki can serve as an advertising platform or simply an office tool. For use as an advertising tool, you will have to pay for it.
• The free wiki is only accessible by people who the creator has invited.
• It's a good idea to integrate the wiki with your actual website. This creates the illusion that you're letting users edit and contribute to the site.
• The Jotspot powered eBay wiki is viewable by anybody, and is accessible on eBay's "Community" page. Its wiki appears to very popular with its audience, although its website is also a heavy-weight.
• For novelty, communication and work place environment issues, JotSpot can be a great tool.
• You can potentially integrate a personal tone to your site with such a wiki. A blog can achieve this, especially if you enable comments, but a wiki is one of the most striking forms of user interaction. This could earn you special kudos if your company is known for being stand-offish or hard to reach.

Their pitch:

"Wetpaint powers websites that tap the power of collaborative thinking. The heart of the Wetpaint advantage is its ability to allow anyone — especially those without technical skill — to create and contribute to websites written for and by those who share a passion or interest. To do this, Wetpaint combines the best aspects of wikis, blogs, forums and social networks so anyone can click and type on the web."

Here's a fun game. Go to Wetpaint, find your way to a Wetpaint site with a number of external links and view its source. Now do a search on "nofollow." That's about how useful Wetpaint is for link love.

Seriously though, Wetpaint lets users create wiki pages with relatively sane URLs, using a template that is quite liberal with images, navigation and secondary pages.

• Like Jotpost, one creates a wiki on Wetpaint.
• If you have something to sell, Wetpaint can be useful for business ventures in that the pages are usually very interest-specific and people who visit a particular page are likely to become customers.
• Wetpaint wikis are available to the public and are free.
• Adsense! Everywhere! If you want it.
• You will potentially have to put up with people posting comments that you don't like. A wiki owner who intends to use the page for marketing will need to keep a close eye on the site's content, which could prove difficult if the wiki has multiple pages. Tread with care.
• Desipte its status as a wiki, you can create a reasonable page, many of which have a lot of user interaction.

Google Acquires JotSpot Wiki Service

Steve Rubel points out that Google has acquired JotSpot.

Google continues to roll on with another acquisition. It just gobbled up JotSpot. And now the wiki service will be free and integrated with the rest of Google's suite of web-based applications.