Being open — or at least wanting to appear open — seems to be gaining some traction: senior execs from LinkedIn, Flickr and SixApart have joined the Data Portability working group, the same one that representatives from Facebook, Plaxo and Google joined a couple of days ago. And according to TechCrunch UK, there are other moves afoot: Google, IBM and Verisign are said to be close to joining the group behind OpenID. One is designed to make it easier to move your data from place to place, and the other is aimed at making it easier to use a single sign-in for different services.

When I wrote about the Facebook and Plaxo news, I got some criticism in the comments and elsewhere for making too big a deal out of it. The companies in question were just joining a working group, many people said, not making any actual changes — and it’s true that such industry groups can become a little like the Bermuda Triangle, with good ideas circling in an endless spiral, unable to escape (there are some good tips on fake openness here).

Still, I think having them join is better than nothing. Marshall Kirkpatrick also notes in his post that these aren’t just deputy assistant coffee-fetchers from Google and LinkedIn and the other companies. Brad Fitzpatrick, the Google guy, was the creator of LiveJournal and is also involved with OpenID and Google’s OpenSocial effort. The Facebook representative is the guy behind Facebook Platform. Are they just joining as window dressing? I suppose it’s possible, but I doubt it.

One more point while I’m writing about data portability. Like many others, I’ve written about this — and the Scoble affair — as a case of who “owns” the data. Ed “Freedom to Tinker” Felten makes a good point in this post, which is that no one actually “owns” this data in any real sense. It’s shared by people with companies, who often share it with other companies through APIs and so on. I think Ed’s point is that it isn’t really helpful (and could actually be dangerous) to think about it as “owning” that data.

LinkedIn, the business-networking site that many (including me) see as an also-ran in the social-networking game, has launched some new features, including a redesigned homepage and a rollout of its previously announced developer platform, which it hopes will make its network as extensible as Facebook has with the F8 platform. Eric Eldon says the changes put LinkedIn ahead, but I must admit that I’m skeptical.

I know that many of my friends who are either looking for work or have been in the past say they get a lot out of LinkedIn, and I’m not saying it doesn’t have value — I think it does, although like my friend Mark Evans I rarely use it. It’s also good to see the network moving forward, even if most of what it is offering seems a little old (I mean, profile pictures? Come on). But the addition of things like a news aggregator for members and on-site messaging could make it more sticky.

That said, I still think that Facebook has a better value proposition for more people, and a better platform. I think the range of things you can do with and on the site is broader, and I think a site that is strictly business-oriented ignores the fact that people have a range of interests and relationships with their friends that in many cases goes beyond just the corporate (and I think Anne Zelenka of GigaOm agrees).

The alternative argument, of course, is that Facebook is just for twentysomethings who want to poke each other and put up goofy pictures. I think Facebook is moving away from that, and has been for some time. It will be interesting to see whether LinkedIn tries to become even more social, or whether it decides to stick to being primarily about business relationships.

As far as I’m concerned, the answer is yes. But I still think it’s interesting to see that LinkedIn is planning to open its network in what appears to be an attempt to “platformize” it the way Facebook did — at least according to a tip that the site All Facebook got (and to a report from Dan Farber at ZDNet). Will it work? Who knows. But I think without it, LinkedIn is probably doomed to be the new Friendster, or at least to be overtaken by Facebook.

In a way, I think Facebook is what LinkedIn could have been if it had taken a different road, and tried to become more of a social network — instead of just a series of digital business cards linked by dotted lines, with no real functionality apart from sending an email (I already know how to do that, thanks). In fact, LinkedIn often seems to spend as much of its time preventing you from doing things as it does actually helping you to do things. Or perhaps there was no way for LinkedIn to have become anything like Facebook, since LI started from the business end of the social curve and Facebook started at the university student end — a much better place to start a foundation, I think.

MG Siegler thinks Facebook should buy LinkedIn, which is not a bad idea (Ashkan ponders this as well). And Dave Winer has an interesting suggestion: someone should not only open up their network, but become the operator of a digital identity service — OpenID style — that could be used anywhere. Jeremiah Owyang has some thoughts along those lines as well. Maybe if Facebook tried that, it might get a better reception than the times Microsoft has tried to do something along those lines.

I’ve talked with several friends about LinkedIn since the Business 2.0 puff piece profile hit the Web — calling the service “MySpace for Grownups” — and the reaction to the company ranges from puzzled indifference to outright revulsion. Like me, many people seem to have signed up because it seemed like a good thing to do at the time, but have gotten very little out of it except contact requests from people we would much rather not hear from.

Is that just a few anti-social people, or a sign of a flawed business model? I would argue it’s the latter. Yes, it’s true that LinkedIn is making money, primarily by charging people to send emails to contacts they don’t know (in other words, to send something that might be considered spam). But the Business 2.0 headline inadvertently points out what I think is the main problem: it isn’t really MySpace at all. In other words, it’s a so-called “social network” that isn’t very social, and I would argue that’s a fatal flaw.

Seamus McCauley puts his finger on it in a recent post at Virtual Economics:

Here’s the problem with LinkedIn – it doesn’t do anything. You sign up, you find some colleagues, you link to them and then…nothing.

Umair Haque of Bubblegeneration says that what LinkedIn is doing is “buying marginal profitability at the expense of scale” (thanks to Seamus for the link). As he points out, the service restricts what you can do — even within your own profile — to such a degree that it makes it virtually impossible to connect with people in any other way but the one or two authorized methods.

MySpace and Facebook and Flickr are popular because they make it easy to connect, share photos, send emails or messages, tag things, search, etc. (yes, you need approval to add someone as a friend on MySpace or Facebook, but you don’t have to pay). LinkedIn does none of those things. In fact, the only thing it does is make it easy for people to spam you with contact requests. Unless it finds a way to expand into a real social network, it is doomed.

Jerry Bowles has some thoughts on his Enterprise Web 2.0 blog, and says that the Business 2.0 article reads like “a wedding announcement written by the bride’s mother.” Good one, Jerry. And Seamus has posted an update to his previous post with some more thoughts about LinkedIn and how it needs to “let go.” And Chuqui is one of those who finds great value in what the network does.