Data Portability: The Microsoft angle

MySpace unveiled on May 8 yet another industry initiative to allow users and developers to share their social-networking data -- a goal Microsoft also has in its sights.

The first partners announcing their participation in MySpace's Data Portability initiative include Yahoo, eBay, Photobucket (also owned by News Corp.'s Fox Interactive Media) and Twitter. I didn't see mentions in any of the Data Portability coverage I saw as to when/whether Microsoft might play here, too.

So here are the answers to those questions: Microsoft demonstrated in March at its TechFest Research fair a project codenamed C2. Microsoft's C2  is a social-aggregation toolkit that can work across desktop, mobile and Web clients. It aggregates data, including friends, call history, photos, contacts and the like -- from Windows Live Spaces, Facebook, MySpace, Flickr, users' email and other sources.

Although it is technically still a research project, C2 was set to begin internal testing at Microsoft in April. A couple of different Microsoft product teams, including the Windows Live for Mobile one, had expressed interest in incorporating C2 into future releases of their services.