Commenting Platforms.
Collaboration Platforms.
Etc.
Just what is a platform, anyway?
We can cobble these things together to create a Rube Goldberg social machine. Imagine this: I tweet a message about a product I like. Which updates my Facebook status. That ties into FriendFeed. Which motivates a blogger's response. Disqus picks up the comments. Radian6 notices and alerts a corporate listening post. Workstreamer alerts a brand manager. The product gets merchandised in a social ad. A customer turns the image into an Obamicon. A friend tweets about how much they're over everyone's red and blue avatars...
Long way to go to get to the [ ] - the way social technologies are discussed today as a bunch of point solutions, not platforms. Think about it - they all function in a pretty similar fashion, really. So why can't we tie them together?
A platform needs to tie together all of the point solutions. I know, easier said than done in part because of industry structural issues. On the enterprise side, most offerings are incomplete and tied to their legacy purposes as internally-focused technology. And then you have to add the services to make everything implement, integrate, and operate as promised.
Seems like a market opportunity to me. But just to be sure, there's a classic case about Crown Cork &Seal that I need to dig up and rethink about...
