Caring is sharing, people, especially when it comes to your personal data. Leading developers from important social-network sites joining a "data-portability" advocacy group doesn't represent history in the making. It's a marketing campaign to make everyone feel sickly sweet, knowing that these websites are so concerned about our information. Like the Care Bears, by signing on to the DataPortability Working Group, top coders like Brad Fitzpatrick, Dave Recordon, and Ben Ling have joined forces to form a group which we can only call by one name. Presenting: The Share Bears!

WEB 2.0 SUMMIT — Brad Fitzpatrick and David Recordon, the nerdy duo working on programming standards for opening up social networks, are presenting a thoroughly less nerdy version of their usual presentation. I chatted with Fitzpatrick, now an engineer at Google, who said he realized he needed to dumb it down for the audience of people wealthy enough to afford the $3,595 ticket price at this conference. The simple metaphor they came up with to explain the problem of closed social networks? Instant messenger. "If Brad is on Yahoo and I'm on AOL, we still want to talk to each other," explains Recordon, who's now at Six Apart, Fitzpatrick's old company. The social graph? "Who my friends are," Recordon sums up. OAuth, the network-ID standard Recordon and Fitzpatrick are championing? "The valet key for the Web," says Fitzpatrick. I can just hear the rich guys in the audience thinking, "Great, kid. Go park my car already." (Photo by CottonCandy)

The notion of social networks like Facebook and Google's Orkut was that they would connect real-world friends, not drive them apart. But a push, driven by technical idealists, to "open" such websites could be driving a wedge between two old friends. David Recordon, right, who recently rejoined blog-software maker Six Apart, has cast aspersions on efforts by Google to make it easier for programmers to hook their software — like Facebook's popular applications — into Orkut and other Google products. So far, it may sound like all business. Companies trash rivals' plans all the time. Here, however, is where things get a bit more personal.

A Valleywag spy reports sighting Brad Fitzpatrick, the creator of LiveJournal and outgoing Six Apart executive, at Philz Coffee in San Francisco. Fitzpatrick was there with book publisher and geek icon Tim O'Reilly and David Recordon, a former Six Apart engineer who left to join VeriSign last year. The three were working on a presentation on "social network portability." Now, that's no surprise — Fitzpatrick has been openly interested in the idea of swapping personal information between websites for a while, and he and Recordon — who we hear, by the way, may be rejoining Six Apart — helped create the OpenID standard, which helps accomplish just that. No, what makes this geek sighting fascinating is that Fitzpatrick, we hear — though neither he nor Google has confirmed this — is headed to Google. And Google has been trying to get back in the social-network game.