http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120269162692857749.html

The new model creates a more trusted environment for reaching high-value, frequent purchasers, whether of airline tickets, electronics, clothes or other items. Where does that leave the less-frequent purchasers? Probably looking to their friends rather than to advertising for advice. I’m an expert on travel; my friends may look to me for hotel choices. When I’m in the mood to buy a book or a new computer, I’ll check out what my friends on Facebook are doing.

This does not mean that traditional online advertising will go away, just that it will become less effective. Value is being created in users’ own walled gardens, which they will cultivate for themselves in real estate owned by the social networks. The new value creators are companies — like Facebook and Dopplr — that know how to build and support online communities.

Alloy Media + Marketing commissioned a study by Harris Interactive toward the end of the 2007 school year. Social networking ranked highly, and was listed as a daily activity by 54% of respondents, second only to e-mail.

More than one-quarter of respondents also said they viewed online video daily, which explains why many students listed YouTube as their favorite Web site.

Tim O’Reilly has a great interview with Kathy Sierra about her philosophy of creating passionate users.

Video of Kevin Marks of Google describing the background behind the Open Social API.

Tim Berners Lee: a cloud around connections between computers and web documents.

New set of complexities. New social sites being built all of the time.

We assume email is part of the web and part of your default experience. Younger people hate email. They only use email to talk to us. We think of email being us. But they think of their social network as being them.

All these things on the web we think of us as documents are actually people. People have links between them. Links between web sites that are people are expressing relationships. XFN and FOAF.

Social Graph API: finds web sites that can be treated as people (blogs and social network profiles) and returns the links between them. These are the publicly declared links on the web. The Social Graph API allows you to find out the friends they have and have already expressed.

The Social Graph API puts a cloud around finding me and finding my friends on the web. These connections can be discovered and used in other places. Open Social abstracts out these relationships and enables you to build this into your application. The cloud is people friends, actions and data.

Lee Bryant articulates a compelling reason for Microsoft and Yahoo to join forces to offer 2.0 services to the enterprise.

The future of enterprise social computing looks like it will involve a combination of internal systems and tools augmented and extended by cloud computing and services. The interaction and adoption models for this will look less like Outlook and more like Flickr or Delicious. Google has bet big on cloud computing, which may eventually form the basis of an appliance business as well for inside the firewall; but Microsoft holds the ring right now with their dominance of internal email (Exchange), the desktop (Windows and Office) and the rise of Sharepoint.

Yahoo currently have some amazing assets that could be deployed to transform Microsoft’s stale, C20th enterprise offering. First, there is Zimbra - a really good communication platform with over 11m mailboxes, according to the company. It provides an excellent Exchange alternative to act as a centre of gravity for a number of enterprise collaboration and interaction modes. Then there is Delicious, Upcoming and some of the other recently acquired services, plus others being developed in-house. Each of these has the potential to make enterprise web apps a lot more useful and interesting than they are right now. Finally, there is the Yahoo interface and design patterns libraries, and the company’s knowledge of how to make useful and compelling Web-native applications that users will enjoy. The problem is, Yahoo have had neither the will nor the culture to turn these assets into valuable enterprise offerings.

Rather than segment the new business into clearly delineated enterprise and consumer divisions, I think there is real scope for throwing the pieces up in the air and recombining them in a more imaginitive way. Enterprise needs the innovation and user experience of consumer-facing web apps, and the consumer side could benefit from the experience of enterprise apps in suporting the basic needs of less motivated and web-aware users.

Only time will tell whether such a coming together of different groups, cultures and tools is possible.