Most folks don’t think twice about the interfaces they use. They use software to get stuff done, to do work, rarely stopping to consider how that interface is dictating their behavior.

Interfaces are, by their very nature, both enabling and confining at the same time. While they allow us to do some interesting thing, they completely dictate how we must do it. They constrain our behavior, defining a rigid set of allowable actions that we must abide by. If an action isn’t available in an interface, then for all intents and purposes you can’t do it. When an interface designer creates an interface, they are not merely adding features, they are drafting the laws of the land.

Over time, we accept the dictates of our interfaces. We come to align our expectations with the interfaces we use. This was the power of Windows for many years. So many people started using computers that happened to be running the Windows operating system that they never considered there were alternatives. Windows was computing.

Similarly, web-based interfaces have taught us a bad lesson: that we don’t own our identity data. We upload information to a web site and forever forward are confined by the hidden privacy policies that we never read in the first place. Because software wasn’t providing features to get that information back out again, we never thought to ask for it. We assumed, slowly but surely, that this was the way web-based software was supposed to work.

Thankfully, this is changing. Consider this wonderful feature on Dopplr, a site to manage your trips. When you choose to close your account, Dopplr exports all of your data and sends it to you via email, by default. Without you asking. And Everything.

Now, most software doesn’t look after us like this. Most software teaches us that in order to keep our data, we must keep using the service. It’s not even polite about it.

But when Dopplr reframes our world with such a simple feature as this, people notice. Here’s the reaction of someone who was pleasantly surprised to get a data-filled email after they closed down their account:

“(Dopplr) clearly get that the owner of the data isn’t them, it’s me and that I shouldn’t have to jump through any hoops to take my data with me after I’m finished using their site. This sort of attention to detail and user friendliness in something as normally mundane as closing an account is exactly the kind of thing that makes me remember them and want to return to their service”

Kudos to Dopplr for teaching their users what is possible with the data they own.

In the last year, I’ve tried to think about, write about, argue for and cajole people into building portable social networks.  I think it’s the richest direction for the systems we design, for service providers and for people who use these services.  I choose my words carefully, thinking that short-term worries are standing in the way of long-term value & creativity.  There are a handful of technical building blocks at the ready, but as Kara Swisher notes, the problems around making social networks portable aren’t really technical.

I will happily note Microsoft’s recent work around their contact API, creating  limited interop with some of the leading social networks.  I would also point to the creation of the Open Social Foundation.  I interpret these as further signs of the inevitability of free(er) flowing social data.  While some of my peers are overly concerned about getting today’s social gorillas to adopt our approaches, I’m more interested in researching, testing & promoting the building blocks of what will become the more durable infrastructure of the social Web.  Which is to say, I don’t think it’s necessarily going to be built or mandated by today’s leading lights.

If you want to see the future of social network interop, watch smaller, more nimble and daring players like Matt Biddulph, of Dopplr.  Above is a screenshot of his recent test, moving beyond contact import to contact subscriptions.  Or watch what happens as Ma.gnolia mandates OpenID for all new accounts. Dopplr and Ma.gnolia aren’t on the hook to generate revenues to support an untenable valuation.  We’ll see truer results from such experiments.  We’ll note what works.  What doesn’t.  Who benefits.  How we have to tweak that solution for other contexts.  We’ll rinse.  Repeat.

In this muddled, two steps forward, one stagger back dance, an interoperable social ecosystem will come to life on the Web.   No shot heard round the world that they can write up on AllThingsD.  The open social Web, like life, will happen while your back is turned.

It is for this reason that I think globalized, generic, manifesto-driven approaches are unsound.  No one wants data portability.  They want to reuse their Last.fm contacts to find the right muxtapes.  They want to invite all their PHP tagged contacts in Highrise to a particular event on Upcoming.org.  They want to share ffffound objects with select groups.  And so on.  Instead of acting like graduate students, let’s be makers.

My hope is that OwnYourIdentity.com will become an open notebook for those efforts.  And I invite you to help us write this story.