One of the “next steps” of the W3C Social Business Jam report is defining key terminology such as Social Platform.
The outcome of the group is to create use cases under Social domains (user stories focused on using social technologies to achieve a predefined outcome).
If the use cases are somehow linked, despite agnostic, of technology used to socialized, it’s important before move forward to achieve to a definition of what is a Social Platform.
Definitions matter to everyone. If the group cannot agree what a Social Platform is all about, how it’s possible to progress on the use case backing?
This definition can:
- Be imported from other community is it is already available;
- Be imported and adapted to the community needs;
- Be architected from the scratch by the group members.
The idea is starting brainstorming around the concept. Ideas should be put here in order to aggregate all the content and to prevent e-mail clutter.
As soon we have a backbone it can be transformed to a document.
Add your ideas and participate.
In your opinion, what is a Social Platform?
Have you say?
Please keep flame wars out of this discussion.
I’d suggest that a social platform is where a person can create a long lasting profile of themselves which can enter into more transient relationships.
Relationships can be where one profile links to another, or multiple profiles are linked together to create a group.
A profile is a representation of a person and can include a webpage and/or a smartphone access points. A social platform can be one that enables SMS groups for example.
Here is my contribution:
The capability provided to an organization to deploy and manage onto a infrastructure artifacts into the layers that constitutes the platform.
The layers reflect the internal and external social interactions an organization executes regarding the organization environment it belongs and evolve over time.
The “recommended” layers of the platform could be:
Social Networks.
Applications.
Integration (Enterprise systems).
Reporting, Search, Mining and Intelligence.
Access and Security.
Persistence.
I think we need to focus on defining what the unique value proposition is. From my perspective, a social business platform (perhaps any social platform) creates unique value where connections are made that would otherwise not have been made. To loyd’s point, the social fabric (aka the social graph) is woven by relationships.