With VoIP service SunRocket closing now, all their customers are moving their phone numbers (voice mail? greetings?) to new services. Painful even if you don't change your phone number.

How much worse, then, if Skype, flickr, LinkedIn, MySpace or facebook shutter their doors? Can you readily extract your contacts, your conversation history, your profiles, your preferences, and group memberships? How about archives of chat sessions, conference calls, postings to groups, images/vids posted, and personalization items like ringtones or avatars?

What do you stand to lose if your social network services close?

Dave Winer, one of the grandfathers of blogging, raised this issue long ago with hosted blog services. So he designed a list of a Manila blog's entries in XML, straightforward for other blog hosts to parse and import. It was rudimentary, not including images and other files stored on the site, but it was the first time you could take your blog to another hosting service. Since then, wordpress and sixapart have adopted their own specs for exporting and backing-up blogs.

The race for SunRocket customers is on. But this will make services like Google's GrandCentral more attractive as a risk management strategy. GrandCentral phone numbers ring your other phone lines, so you just hand out your GC number. GC users bet Google will continue GrandCentral's service longer and with less disruption than other VoIP or telephony providers.

Facebook's new application channel spreads our lives and relationships across multiple systems.

Which leaves us with:

• Who is the GrandCentral for my social networks?

• What are the standards for social network portability?

• Which features are so common and such a commodity that everyone could support interop?

• What is your personal economic risk? What is your workplace's business risk? How much of our work lives are enmeshed in, and tied to the success of, these digital lifestyle aggregators (a Marc Canter term)?

• How should consumers organize to demand digital identity and social network portability?

• Can data portability become a minimum requirement for enterprise participation in social networks?

See also:

• Marc Canter: Open Letter to Marc Andressen, Gina Bianchini and Diego Doval
• Marc Canter: Open Standards for Social Networking
• Dave Winer: It's time to open up networking, again
• Russell Shaw: Nuvio to SunRocket orphans: we can set you up in “matter of minutes”
• Russell Shaw: Ex SunRocket vendor on SR flameout: “we saw this coming a mile away”
• Russell Shaw: VoIP provider ViaTalk: we’ll buy out your SunRocket contract
• Russell Shaw: Vonage to SunRocket orphans: we’ll give you two free months