Now that Google and Facebook have validated the importance of DataPortability, it's important to think about the ramifications on how these standards translate to the enterprise.

We've been focused on standards for years, so this is very exciting news for us. Google and Facebook's support of DataPortability will put tremendous pressure on both consumer and enterprise social software. If you're a vendor in this space, you'll need to support these standards. I imagine there may even be some companies that will need to, unfortunately, re-examine and/or rebuild their product architectures.

In the meantime, data standards in the enterprise are less clear. Google Docs currently uses SAML. Will they now move to OpenID and OAuth? As people like Google push to the enterprise, it will be critical to put real standards in place. The problem with OpenID, OAuth, Microformats, RSS, Atom, etc is that there's not the same standards body in place like we see in our participation with the XMPP Foundation. As much as tbe blogosphere loves to talk about things like OpenID, etc, they need a true standards body, process, and protocol around them for there to be any enterprise traction.

We've committed to clear standards, like XMPP. We've even seen Google, IBM and Yahoo engage with our code. We will commit to new standards as they clarify and given the gravity of Google and Facebook, DataPortability should be one of them. Bottomline: we'll charge ahead on the standards that have the biggest impact to delivering social productivity in the enterprise.