Sony CEO Howard Stringer gave a keynote speech at Nikkei Electronics Asia that for the most part sounded like a lament about losing their chance to beat Apple to the punch in the digital music area.  But that’s not what really got my attention.

The interview led to talking about being more open in the future rather than locking customers into a proprietary system.  Sony wants to open the Playstation Network to devices beyond the PS3.  Throw in a few more gimmicky words like “web services” into the mix and then you have a few more interesting potentials there.

Which brought back a small brainstorm I had with a friend on the phone a while back.  PSN, Wii Shop/Miis, XBox Live, each of these are like vertical columns that do not talk to one another, but each contains a lot of redundant profile information.

Of course, each company right now would rather burn in flames hemorrhaging billions of dollars before having a single internet service that allows you to sign in/port your profile from one system to the other, but Sony at the moment seems fairly open to the idea.

So here’s my modest proposal: Gamer Profile Interchange Format, or GPIF for short.  As much as the anti-XML zealots would hate it, GPIF packaging and bussing could be most easily done using it, passing information through HTTP, something that, if I remember correctly, is supported by the 360, Wii, and the PS3 right now.

All that would be required of each system is a small software layer to pass and parse this information from the data source.  At a minimum, it would have the Venn overlap of all data elements common to each system, then build on that with extensions much like the Jabber protocol does.  Think like the Blogger API that pretty much standardized the back-end for just about everything out there.

While we’re at it, leaderboards could be incorporated into the API as well. Platform-specific keys for each game would be sent with the payload so that cross-referencing and differentiation become possible.

Money, however, is king in this business and Microsoft, Nintendo, and Sony all know this.  If gamers demanded something like this so they could move their profiles from one system to another when they go to a friend’s house to play a port of a game from one console to another, there might be some momentum.  But this kind of thing has to come from within.

All of this is could, could, could.  The technology is there, it’s mature.  Unfortunately the companies aren’t yet.  Meanwhile, the more open companies are steamrolling them in this area.