According to ReadWriteWeb, Google and Facebook have now joined the Data Portability Workgroup.

The DataPortability Workgroup announced this morning that representatives from both Google and Facebook are joining its ranks. The group is working on a variety of projects to foster an era of Data Portability – where users can take their data from the websites they use to reuse elsewhere and where vendors can leverage safe cross-site data exchange for a whole new level of innovation. Good bye customer lock-in, hello to new privacy challenges. If things go right, today could be a very important day in the history of the internet.

What it means: I agree that, if this is not a public relations stunt, this could be a very important move for Web users. It would drastically simplify the “socialization” of the Web. Data portability has been at the forefront of the conversation for the last 6 months and was crystalized last week by Robert Scoble’s suspension from Facebook. Let’s hope these two companies are not joining the group to slow down the efforts.