Rise of the Social Web

We are moving away from social silos to a world of social applications that federate and communicate with eachother through well-known, open and published interfaces. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has been running an "incubator group" on this topic (the "Social Web Incubator" http://www.w3.org/2005/Incubator/socialweb/) which has brought together a number of different communities involved in this "movement." The big social networks are already becoming a part of this - witness Facebook's seat on the board of the OpenID foundation as an example -- but the big winner will be the innovative start-ups in the "long tail" who will increasingly be able to leverage capabilities of other social networks and infrastructure companies such as operators in order to more easily provide new sticky features to their users.

Why is this important for the mobile industry? Because people are increasingly doing their social networking through their mobile devices. Teens in school are buying Blackberrys so they can more effectively use Facebook. Mobile has also proved a fertile ground for social network applications and services to sprout. Social media is the future of communication.

This talk will draw a picture of the changing landscape of social media across Web and Mobile and a map of the various industry and community efforts involved.