While few can argue with the broad goal of data portability, the road towards broad data portability is long; thorny technology, business and privacy issues need to be worked out and solutions agreed upon industry-wide.

For example, days after the initial announcements of their data portability programs in May, Google and Facebook promptly locked horns. Facebook blocked Google's Friend Connect service from accessing Facebook members' data, saying the Google program violates its terms of services because it redistributes Facebook user information to developers without users' knowledge.

The impasse remains. Last week, seemingly to underscore how competitively important their respective data portability efforts are, Google and Facebook separately announced on the same day that they were opening up their programs more broadly.

MySpace's decision to mesh its MySpaceID with Friend Connect isn't surprising, considering the companies' collaboration on OpenSocial, a project Google launched to come up with a common set of APIs for social networking applications. OpenSocial hasn't been adopted by Facebook. Many consider OpenSocial a threat to Facebook's application development program for external programmers. Facebook's program was first out of the gate and is considered the front-runner.

MySpaceID has so far been implemented by AOL, Flock, Eventful and Flixster, among others. New MySpaceID partners announced Monday include Vodafone and Netvibes.