what is the platform?

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 ...

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 ...