Here we don't make the news.  No, news making is for, frankly, 'news makers'.  We tend to read and think about things and then we try to talk about the elements that interest us and hopefully others.  So we have sat back a little whilst the early debate around Opensocial, Googles attempt at aggregating social platforms in a defensive move against Facebook, brakes out.  It was on Wikinomics that we read the first item on this story that got us thinking.   They ask that if Microsoft was the platform of the 1990,s and Google the platfrom of the early 2000's, is there an arguement that says Facebook is the platform of the next decade? We have been discussing something similar in our seminars at Cisco recently.  There was a piece of research from Mckinsey recently on German social sites.  Broadly it argued that only 2% of "member" actually did any work (eg posting, tagging etc).  Whether this is true or not, I think it is fair to assume that any site that requires UG for growth and content is dependent on a fractional element of what people claim to be the total user base (I accept that Facebook et al this may be much higher, but still I would love to see how many people as a % regularly manage their profile).  The point is that where social sites are built on profiles then the "work" required from each participant to may be a barrier to social platform becoming a dominant platform in the form you outline.  Whilst this must be good news for the Microsoft/Facebook tie up, as Facebook now has a critical mass (?), the concept of "Facebook fatigue" - bored with maintaining a profile and objecting to having to create one from scratch - may play into the hands of those who think that Facebook platforms are fashion driven which is the time bomb ticking under each one.

It would seem logical to us that the platforms with potential to maintain dominance over the next decade are those that support content creation that the crowd values, Microsoft has this corner covered, and applications that help people find what they want, Google and Friends - but as you have argued on this blog before is Google itself under threat from more intelligent search?  It feels like the status quo will be maintained - does that make me sound like a Luddite?

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