In an announcement yesterday, Google, Facebook, and Plaxo joined the DataPortability.org Workgroup. The announcement stated that as key players in the social networking space, “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 initiative is focused on creating end-to-end data portability for which it claims the technology already exists so that “as users, our identity, photos, videos and other forms of personal data should be discoverable by, and shared between our chosen tools or vendors”.