The revolution of social platforms –4. Another SaaS profession

    This note, with some delay, continues our conversation about a new round of development of social networks , what kind of round it is and why I call it revolutionary. Despite the fact that it is numbered as the fourth, in fact, this is the fifth note of this cycle (in the interval was published “ From the madness of the crowd ... ” - a note at the junction of several topics).

    In this article I want to talk about transparent social platforms . Let me remind you * that transparent (white label) platforms are platforms focused on creating social spaces (resources) that do not carry any information or carry minimal information about the platforms themselves that generated these resources.

    The Russian-language equivalent of the term white label in the context of platforms was proposed by me. If you prefer, you can use “traceless”, “invisible”, “hidden”, “self-bleaching” platform or something else instead of “transparent platform” when translating. That is not the point; only the essence would be clear.
    About transparent SaaS platforms
    Further, we will discuss here only the most characteristic subset of transparent platforms belonging to the class of multi-purpose operating platforms *. The named class of platforms combines instrumental functions (development environment) and functions of the working environment (run-time environment). Moreover, the instrumental service is provided to the customer only in the “on demand” mode. In other words, we will talk about transparent social SaaS - platforms *, bearing in mind, first of all, the instrumental component of their services.

    In the time interval after the publication of the first article in the series about social platforms, in Techncrunch I came across a fairly thorough review article on the class of transparent platforms that interests us.

    Nine Ways to Build Your Own Social Network
    Namely, this article is named according to the number of platforms considered. About 200 readers commented on the article, therefore, I think that after reading all this, everyone who is interested in the problem will well understand the features of transparent SaaS platforms. However, for those who prefer to read in Russian on their blog in iTech Bridge, I give an abstract of the indicated article with some generalizations and notes. In addition, I included Pringo, one more fairly advanced platform, which the author for some reason did not include in his nine.

    Many of the claims of the author of the abstracted article were verified by me. In this case, direct links to relevant resources are left in the abstract. First of all, this concerns Ning - one of the leaders in the world of transparent social SaaS - platforms, almost direct Russian equivalent of which is ucoz.ru. Information without direct links is left to the conscience of the author.

    Transparent platforms also open.
    I also want to add from myself that, in addition to internal or own openness at the level of programmer interfaces and user information inherent in many platforms discussed in the article, the general trends of the social web put on the agenda the task of external openness to other social resources.

    The first in this direction began the Ning movement. I already mentionedthat the company that owns these resources is included in the "closed affiliate club" Open Social.

    Today, Ning as an external container (in the terminology of Open Social) allows each application (apps) compatible with Open Social to connect to any resource created on the basis of the Ning platform. After that, any user of the resource to which some such application is connected can become a user of this application.

    Earlier, Ning included a tool service in its platform, using which any customer can easily build an application for FaceBook and connect it to the latter. True, this application will have rather limited capabilities, but on the other hand, it can literally be created in a few minutes by a person who is completely unfamiliar with programming.

    Ning is currently working on a similar mechanism, but for Open Social. At a minimum, you can expect that any target Ning resource will be easily connected as an application to Orkut, and then to other containers from members of the “closed club”. Moreover, which is very important, the hosting of such an application is also fully supported by Ning servers.

    There is no doubt that other transparent social SaaS platforms will not move along the Ning path today. An interesting one then looms up, as the hero of one of the last television series liked to repeat, an oil painting. But I plan to talk about this in my next article.

    Well, for now, I remind you once again that you can get acquainted with the abstract in Russian of the article presented above here .

    - * The classification of social platforms is given in my other note in this series.

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