Brought to you by a team of developers led by the guy that invented the World Wide Web (Tim Berners-Lee), Solid is a new project designed to “radically change the way Web applications work today, resulting in true data ownership as well as improved privacy.” The basic idea is that the data in an application is “decoupled” from the data inside it, meaning that if your favorite service shuts down (like MySpace, Jaiku, etc), you can switch to another and not lose what you did on that service. You would control your data and what happens to it. Stephen Downes looks at some of the applications being built on Solid. Solid is probably quite a way away from going mainstream, so don’t plan to use it this Fall in classes. However, for people that want to get serious about data ownership, this is a project to keep your eyes on.