what is the platform?

Facebook announcement of Places service is an important event in the Platform race. Facebook could have partnered with Foursquare or some other geospatial player(s) . Instead, Facebook is going for leverage strategy, aiming to build and control its own "wide platform". Possible strategic response for Foursquare,  threatened by Facebook ambitions and lock of the "wider platform", is to integrate with a new,  "open" social platform such as Diaspora.  It would be a mistake for Foursquare to try to build its own social platform, unless they make it "open" and convince other major players like Zynga to integrate with it.

In this post, I will communicate my vision of the User Platform . The Platform is a future Internet user-centered semantic web service, around which the ecosystem of information space services is built. The information space is comprised of web, media, real life, augmented reality, and all other media in which humans, nature, and machines interact. The Platform has five integrated components – User Platform, Groups Platform, Things Platform, Services Platform, and Content Platform.   Picture 1. User Platform   I will call the core service of the User Platform, servicing a specific user, a Platform Cell . It is indicated as the blue circle in the diagram. The Platform Cell is a human’s second brain in the information space that always works and never sleeps. The Platform makes sense of what is happening with the user and around the user, in real time. The User Platform creates user-related knowledge and uses that knowledge to communicate with the ecosystem of information space

As the industry moves towards the Platform, the battle for control of private data between users, governments and vendors intensifies.  Emirati officials have declared BlackBerry smartphones a potential threat to national security because users' data is stored overseas, where local laws don't apply and where analysts say it could be harder for authorities to monitor. http://finance.yahoo.com/news/UAE-says-BlackBerry-is-apf-959472235.html?x=0

HP in the Platform race? They want to be Apple. They want be the makers of high-quality consumer gadgets all connected by way of a digital ecosystem. An ecosystem they own and operate. One tied together by webOS. http://techcrunch.com/2010/07/22/hp-apple-webos/

The Platform is a core service of the future Internet that links individuals, groups, things, content, and services to enable semantically connected global cloud computing ecosystem.

David Siegel is starting up his own Platform company!  http://thepowerofpull.com/pull/blog

Thus Internet applications have so far been developed mainly for fitting to specific networks. Now itís time for a change. Networks should be developed for applications. The universe of these networks might be considered as the Future Internet. The future network ecosystem will be supported by a consolidated, preferably single, platform. This platform needs to include support for services, things and content on both network and application layer. The FI ecosystem has to be sustainable, meaning that applications are supported efficiently, i.e. consuming a minimal amount of required resources, e.g. capacity, electricity, etc., while providing dedicated security and sufficient performance for the applications throughout their lifetime.   3rd Future Internet Symposium 2010 - Call for Papers

I first read about Diaspora project in the David Notik's blog entry .  It's a student project attempting to build an open-source social networking platform. Diaspora will let users fully control and manage their own information.  Initially, it started as a reaction to Facebook privacy concerns. What Diaspora is doing is essentially an attempt to build some key components of the Platform - a simple version of the Platform Cell (user profile) and the social network. Diaspora may well become successful in building an open movement alternative to Facebook. However,  it will not be able to create the Platform. The Platform is a core operating system of the internet, it should provide APIs to an array of core services, such as web browsers, storage, media content distributions systems, healthcare information management,  geo-social networks, video conferencing, autonomous agent services, marketing service, payment and micropayment services. It should also provide APIs for tools t

Tim O'Reilly is a visionary who has been talking about the Platform for years. He's calling it an Internet Operating System. He talks about the Platform and reviews the race - Tim calls it "the great game". This is the crux of my argument about the internet operating system. We are once again approaching the point at which the Faustian bargain will be made: simply use our facilities, and the complexity will go away. And much as happened during the 1980s, there is more than one company making that promise. We're entering a modern version of " the Great Game ", the rivalry to control the narrow passes to the promised future of computing. (John Battelle calls them " points of control ".) This rivalry is seen most acutely in mobile applications that rely on internet services as back-ends. As Nick Bilton of the New York Times described it in a recent article comparing the Google Nexus One and the iPhone : The State of the Internet Operating System

The MUSIC ( Self-adapting applications for M obile Us ers I n ubiquitous C omputing environments) project is an EU sponsored effort to engineer something very relevant to the Platform. MUSIC is building middle-ware that enables development of mobile applications across different mobile vendors and service providers (any network/any device concept). The project has created software design methodology and middleware to enable creation of self-adapting mobile applications. Something like MUSIC will be an essential component of the Platform. However, MUSIC itself is unlikely to evolve into the Platform. It is mostly a software-development methodology rather than a core Web service. MUSIC project would need to grow commercial and marketing muscle to penetrate the market. I would start with renaming the project - it's difficult to search for it on the internet. The user-centric approach of the MUSIC project is conceptually aligned with the Platform. However, my understanding is that t

Google is planning to launch a micropayment service Newspass that will provide customers with a unified pay as you go mechanism for web media, acccording to La Repubblica. Ultimately, a smart micropayment service will be the key component of the Platform. Whenever someone clicks on a link, the Platform would instantly provide "micro-negotiations" between the user's Platform Cell and the web site, negotiating the payment, different discounts based on the customer's marketing profile within the Platform, and other special offers. In most cases, the negotiations will be handled automatically, the user will only need to confirm his agreement in non-standard situations such as excessively high price, additional binding conditions, and special offers. The same micro-negotiations mechanism coordinated across real life and the Web will be facilitated by the Platform for the mobile phone users. It would help customers negotiate discounts at restaurants they are passing buy

This paper from the Future Internet 2nd Usage Area Workshop hosted by the EFII on the 9th of June 2010 at Madrid provides excellent summary of possible Platform architecture. SOaaS ( Solution-as-a-Service ) is described as a cloud computing paradigm that envisions delivering cloud-based solutions instead of ‘software’. SOaaS focuses real-world business and end- user needs and delivers solutions that are user-centric (not software centric), collaborative (not closed), truly personalised (not template based) and manage-free (not ‘install and continuously update’). This is one more voice calling for the Platform to be a public utility. Every person (user, citizen) would get an individual space within the Platform, and the services will be build around each user. Since the Platform will be truly global, it will be outside of authority of the national governments, therefore it's difficult to say who will be ultimately responsible for governing it. Ultimately, this model calls for the

Mozilla announced yesterday that its Firefox Sync will be integrated in the Firefox 4 browser. Sync will be an integrated (opt-in, of course) feature of Firefox 4. It makes your bookmarks, history, Awesome Bar intelligence, passwords, form-fill data and open tabs accessible from Firefox running on other computers and mobile phones. Mozilla is taking a step in strategically right direction - this is the step towards the Platform. Mozilla senses that the mobile access devices have become mature enough to allow this to happen. The race is on! And unlike cloud services that use your data to track your travels throughout the Web for ad targeting or other purposes, Firefox Sync encrypts all of your data before sending it to the server Mozilla should not shy away from advertising - this is where the money is. The winning Platform will allow users to control how they are advertised to and to get their share of ad revenues. The leading players - Google, Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, Twitter

Rajnish Sharma (Systems Officer, UPTEC Computer Consultancy) believes that, "The next generation of the Web is Web 3.0, will make tasks like your search faster and easier. Instead of multiple searches, you might type a complex sentence or two in your Web 3.0 browser, and the Web will do the rest. The browser will analyze your response, search the Internet for all possible answers, and then organize the results for you. The Web 3.0 browser will act like a personal assistant. As you search the Web, the browser learns what you are interested in. The more you use the Web, the more your browser learns about you and the less specific you'll need to be with your questions. Eventually you might be able to ask your browser open questions like 'where should I go for lunch?' Your browser would consult its records of what you like and dislike, take into account your current location and then suggest a list of restaurants." - Quoted from wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wi