How the Platform Game Will Play Out

First published October 11, 2007 

Seems like everyone wants to be a platform.

It started with Facebook.

Not to be outdone, MySpace followed. So did Bebo.

Don’t forget Hi5.  
 
By now, it is becoming apparent that it is not the platforms that are scarce, but rather the communities of developers that are (and remember: not developers, butcommunities of developers). With that in mind, Tagged decides to mimic Facebook’s platform -- so that apps developed on Facebook can run on Tagged. 
 
At the same time, niche social networks are proliferating.

The next step is for the developers to create their own platform. 
 
The platform will be totally distributed, so that developers can run their own niche platform on their own servers.  
 
The tricky part: a system needs to be created that creates some type of incentive for developers to work together and share data. To make this issue even trickier, privacy issues need to be respected.  
 
If this is done properly, it will solve the siloed data problem. In other words, it will bring about the implicit/semantic web. 

There you have it: the future.  
 
Now what's the first step in creating this future? 
 
The first step is in creating the platform that is owned by the development community.  
 
We don't need to start from scratch here (although some will say that is advantageous, and they may be right). We could, though, look to see what open source content management systems have fostered a robust community of hackers/app developers.  
 
I know what many of you are thinking: Drupal.  
 
Ugh. Everyone I've talked to disagrees with me on this matter, but I don't think Drupal has the versatility needed, nor do I think it is the best platform for developers. 
 
I vote vBulletin. 

I know, I know, I'm crazy, I'm stupid, I'm a kook, it's just a message board, it won't scale, it's too database-intensive, it's not good enough, Drupal is better, blah blah blah.....  
 
I disagree, obviously, but I'm open to having my mind changed. What I do know, though, is that out of all content management systems I've tried (and I've given a quick review of many of them, and have given Drupal a more thorough review), a severely hacked vBulletin is best positioned to deliver the promise of the RSS-powered, personalized, implicit community web.  
 
But we'll see.  
 
One last thought: in all the fun and happy talk about the wonderful world the implicit/semantic web will bring us, scarcely mentioned are privacy issues, and even scarcer are legal issues -- especially when online communities in different geographical regions seek to share data. This is where we may see online governance truly disrupt the nation-state as a model of governance. It might sound kooky, but, as readers of this blog are all too aware, the Truth often does.