Must Read: The coming Cloud wars: Google+ vs Microsoft (plus Facebook) (Wired UK)

Today, social networks maintain your identity across a wide range of cloud-based services spanning multiple devices. Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Twitter aren't just providing you with the digital equivalent of your mailing address, but also your driver's licence, passport, car keys and credit cards.

At O'Reilly Radar, Edd Dumbill offers a helpful  anatomy of social networks' new functions:

• Identity -- authenticating you as a user, and storing information about you
• Sharing -- access rights over content
• Notification -- informing users of changes to content or contacts' content
• Annotation -- commenting on content
• Communication -- direct interaction among members of the system

Dumbill calls this "the social backbone of the web." It's already a much bigger part of the tech ecosystem than any particular portal you may log into and stare at for part of the day reading status updates.

When Google's chairman and ex-CEO Eric Schmidt  talks about Facebook's achievement, he almost never uses the word social. Instead, he talks about identity:

Fundamentally, what Facebook has done is built a way for you to figure out who people are. That system is missing in the internet as a whole. Google should have worked on this earlier. We now have a product called Google+, which has been in development for more than a year and a half, which is a partial answer to that…

I think that's the area where I would have put more resources, developing these identity services and ranking systems that go along with that. That would have made a big difference for the internet as a whole.

via wired.co.uk

Posted via email from Siobhan O'Flynn's 1001 Tales