Social network portability. Single signon. Digital identity. Keeping personal info private. These are all important things that both users and developers are concerned about. Me too and so I called Kaliya Hamlin, aka “Identity Woman.”

She knows EVERYONE who is working on dataportability or identity and is one of the people who really helped OpenID happen.

So, listening to her on these issues is important and she certainly made me smarter and invited me to a raft of interesting events coming soon.

This was split up into four parts, because BlogTalkRadio’s Cinch service only lets me record for about eight minutes at a clip.

Sorry that I’m so loud compared to her, gotta figure out a better way to do phone interviews (I was using an iPhone in my car).

Part I (the first few seconds are silent, so wait for the recording to start at about 40 seconds into it, these are all audio-only MP3s).
Part II.
Part III.
Part IV.

What did she teach me? What XRI is. That lets developers build features that will federate between social networks your email address, photos, and other personal identifying info. Right now it’s a real pain, because if you need to change something, like your email address, you’ve got to do it on all your services (and I’m on more than 20 so far).

Also discussed:

XRI/XDI and LLLI (Breast Feeding Moms)

Higgins: Open Source Community for Common Identity Framework

Two Identity + Semantic tools being developed – these kinds of things are critical to creating data sharing across context

Higgins OWL & XDI-RDF (drummond explaining it to Chris Mesina).

We talked about the state of dataportability and what she’s seeing developers trying to work on and the events that she recommends, in particular these two:

1. Identity Information Workshop. May 12-14 in Mountain View, CA
2. The Data Sharing Summit, May 15, in Mountain View, CA.
2.

If you are working on this stuff and you aren’t following Identity Woman you really should.

The one business that has most gotten my attention, other than Qik.com, so far this year is FriendFeed. They are growing very quickly, 25% every few days.

Today I was fortunate to meet up with co-founder Bret Taylor and Paul Buchheit. If you don’t read these two guys’ blogs (here’s Paul’s and here’s Bret’s), you really should, they have written a ton of stuff that entrepreneurs should read.

It’s long, 46 minutes or so, but today I visited FriendFeed’s offices and met up with their team, which includes some of the original authors of Google Maps and Google Gmail, who left Google to start FriendFeed. We cover a LOT of ground.

We learned a lot (there were people asking questions on my cell phone thanks to Qik) and we learned that they are attempting to build a new, scalable, culture.

At 2:57 we cover what FriendFeed is, that’s really where the interview starts getting interesting.

What do you think? Does your opinion of FriendFeed change after getting a chance to spend some time with Bret and Paul?

The first video ends abruptly when the 3G disappeared, we restarted the phone and finished off the interview here.

Last week I talked about how Cemaphore is helping out Google by providing a new live sync technology between Microsoft Outlook and Google’s Gmail and Calendar. This rocks and I want it in the worst way, since I’m moving my life over to Gmail and Google Calendar.

Here’s a first look with the CEO, Tyrone Pike. I have a longer interview with Tyrone too, where we learn more about Cemaphore’s business.