Want to see Paris Hilton's MySpace profile? How about Lindsay Lohan's? Don't worry about those pesky privacy settings. Thanks to "data portability," a faddish technology movement that the Valley has been buzzing about for months, you can see any profile you want on MySpace. Byron Ng, a Canadian computer technician …

Byron Ng's instructions for viewing any MySpace profile:

Facebook launched its Japanese-language version today and vision-questing, globe-trotting CEO Mark Zuckerberg magically appeared in the land of the rising sun to take reporters' questions. Among the queries: What's the deal with Facebook dropping Google Friend Connect, the search engine's new service that sucks data…

Who are these people? That's the problem I've long had with sites like Twitter and eBay, which offer anonymous user names and little else to go by. And that's been the charm of Facebook, which aims to tie online identities with real ones by asking for work and school information, which is harder to fudge than a screen…

Professional annoyances Chris Saad and Marc Canter argue the obscurities of opening up social-network websites to outside programmers at a meeting of the DataPortability Workgroup. Can you suggest a better caption? Bonus points if you can work in an allusion to the Share Bears.

Photo sharing site and Yahoo subsidiary Flickr released a new friend finder feature yesterday that will search your email contact lists, much like many other social networking sites have done over the past few years. The difference is that rather than giving Flickr your email and password to access your account,…

Joseph Smarr is Plaxo's chief platform architect and one of the data-portability Share Bears. He just wants you to be able to snuggle your friends from one website to the next. How sweet! Smarr gave a speech on the subject at this weekend's Foo Camp nerdfest. I'd do a 100-word version of it, but I just can't keep…

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…

Microsoft, I'm told, "is involved in many broad industry dialogues, including the DataPortability Project, and is committed to being an integral part of the industry conversation on behalf of its users." Oops, sorry did I just inflict a bit of unfiltered flackspeak on you? Sorry. Translation: Microsoft wants you…