If you're using multiple social web services, you will also have multiple online identities. For creating a comprehensive online persona, consolidation between the various profiles would be useful.

To aid in this, and to enable social network portability, Google has started aggregating social networking data marked up in the XFN and rel=me microformats to build a comprehensive social graph.

Having a portable online identity and contact network would be very useful, as it would make signing up and using new web services much easier. Instead of having to invite all your friends multiple times, you would just point to some of your existing profiles and the service would gather your contacts and profile information from there.

To experiment with the concept I added my various online profiles into my home page, and gave the URL to Plaxo's Online Identity Consolidator. It was able to find quite a good set of profiles and connect them to me:

It will be interesting to see how various websites will start utilizing Google's new services. I've joined the Data Portability action group in order to implement some of these things in Midgard CMS.

Updated 14:52Z: Very good write-up on Bokardo

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