Flavio Rump, in this Qik video, asks something very interesting: is the DataPortability.org just PR? He’s been kicked off of several social networks for trying to import JUST NAMES into Facebook. Wants to know if any social network is actually changing its behavior when it comes to sharing data. He hasn’t seen any action yet and, in the video, we talk about a raft of dataportability issues. Interesting hallway conversations from LIFT in Geneva, Switzerland.

One of the reasons I went with Fast Company instead of other places is that they are investing a lot on their online properties. FastCompany.com today turned on its new look and a new social network. My new boss, Ed Sussman, talks about the new stuff.

I’m so disappointed. Yahoo just turned on a live video service. It’s the top item on TechMeme. I thought I’d try it here at LIFT. But, I find some bad things:

1. The service doesn’t work. Says “Yahoo! Live is an experimental release. We’ve experienced heavy traffic and are taking a breather to tune things up a bit.”
2. It doesn’t work on cell phones like Qik does.
3. It doesn’t record live sessions.

This is the best that Yahoo can do?

Sigh.

Compare to Qik. Which lets me start a live video in two clicks on my Nokia phone. And interact with a live chat room.

Or to Ustream. Or Justin.tv. Or BlogTV. Or Stickcam. Or Flixwagon.

Speaking of Qik, I’ve put up a few videos from the LIFT conference up on my page. They also professionally recorded each session and those are now up on the LIFT08 speech page with more coming soon. I’ll give you a list of what I found interesting. My favorite session so far was of Eric Favre, inventor of the Nespresso machine, but the video game sessions this morning were very good too.

Lots of systems are integrating into Twitter. The Qik.com live cell phone streaming system lets me tell my Twitter followers that I’m sending live streaming video. I just hit “55″ on my phone and it automatically sends a message to Twitter.

Now Kyte.tv is doing the same thing.

Twitter could become the new presence infrastructure company if this trend continues. You might never even read Twitter but Twitter could pass messages between systems to tell various apps and services when you’re online, or when you’re available.

How does Twitter turn that into a business? That’s the $64,000 question, isn’t it?

Also, Twitter has had a lot of uptime problems lately. If they are going to be used as infrastructure by more companies their reliability has to improve.

Let’s see. I’m on Twitter, Facebook, WordPress, Upcoming, Pownce, Plaxo, Yelp, MySpace, Flickr, Dopplr, and a few others.

The problem? They don’t know about each other.

Google, today, with its new Social Graph API, is trying to hook all of those together.

Another problem? If you’re a developer and build a “foograph” your new application doesn’t have anyone on it. There’s nothing lamer than a new social network that has no one on it.

Google’s new effort lets you import friends from other social networks into your new application.

The details are on the new Google Social API site (the sample apps should be turned on shortly but weren’t working when published this blog post) with more background from Brad Fitzgerald on the Google Code blog.

The problem is that for apps to be able to sense all your connections you’ll need to add (rel=”me”) tags.

Mike Arrington at TechCrunch has a few more details on this announcement.

In the test that they ran for me it showed about half of my social networks. I expect that will increase pretty rapidly as more social networking systems support the “rel=”me”" system.

UPDATE: Plaxo just shipped the first app (they claim) using this new API.

I just got an invite from DotSub’s CEO, Michael Smolen to come along with him and Joi Ito to see Larry Lessig’s last speech on Free Culture. Weird, seeing my last post. Of course I’ll put part of it on my Qik channel! By the way, my Qik videos now automatically show up on Seesmic as well. Hopefully YouTube soon. If you’re near Stanford you can come too!

Some more thoughts about photography at Davos — here’s what separates me from the pros (there were a ton of the world’s best photographers at Davos):

1. The pros had better lenses. Some of the lenses they were carrying around were $8,000 each. I only had a single 50 mm lens.
2. The pros got closer. Sometimes only inches closer but often much closer than I could get (especially when we shot Condoleezza Rice).
3. The pros shot more. I sat right next to them and they easily shot 10 times more images.
4. The pros are better at seeing “key moments.” They would anticipate when someone was about to do something interesting and machine-gun the shutter.
5. The pros had editors. I’m sure that of the thousands of images each pro made that their editors only let their very best work hit the media. Me? I posted a lot more than they probably did.
6. The pros didn’t just shoot the main action. One photographer I was watching kept shooting everyone EXCEPT for the person talking. She was getting great reaction shots that were more interesting than mine.

That said, they were jealous of the Nikon D3 I was carrying. They knew it was more sensitive to low light. One pro told me he couldn’t afford to give up his Canon lenses, but if he could he would.