The+social+web



The Social Web is a global data sharing network sort of like the World Wide Web, But what the difference is that instead of linking documents, The Social Web links people, concepts and organizations.

Members of the OASIS XDI technical committeepublished an article titled “The Social Web: Building an open Social Network With XDI” http://journal.planetwork.net/article.php?lab=reed0704 this article first introduced the term Social Web. The paper talks about the fact that the introduction of a new protocol for distributing mediated data sharing and synchronization, XDI, could enable a new layer of trusted data interchange applications.

"Perhaps the best analogy for the Social Web is the worldwide banking and credit card system. This infrastructure has evolved over centuries to facilitate the global exchange of a very sensitive form of data — money — by establishing a common means of exchange among trusted third party service providers — banks. The Social Web takes the same approach for exchange of private, sensitive information by establishing a common means of exchange among trusted third party service providers" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Social_Web

“With each new network comes new capabilities—more information to share, in richer formats, over more channels, with more parties, at greater speeds. As might be expected from the pace of innovation shown in Table 1, the next evolutionary step is already upon us: the rise of social networks.”


 * The Social Web**

This fabric of trusted online relationships can lead to the development of an entirely new layer of the Internet. This layer was foreseen by David Johnson, Susan Crawford, and John Palfrey, Jr. in their January 2004 Aspen Institute paper "The Accountable Net: Peer Production of Internet Governance."[8] In their argument for new technologies that enable Internet users to choose and verify with whom they interact, they put it this way:

"What we are positing is a state change that will amount to the addition of a new social layer to the Internet protocol stack."

In a technical sense, that is exactly what can happen with XDI. Just as the open standard TCP/IP protocol created the Internet, and the open standard HTTP protocol created the Web, XDI is an open standard protocol that can join today's emerging social networks into one interoperable Social Web. This layer will evolve naturally over the existing HTTP-based Web the same way the Web evolved over the then-existing Internet.



Sources: __Images __www.businessweek.com/.../ technology/03social.gif

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