A couple weeks ago, I hosted a talk by Charlene Li at Adaptive Path on behalf of the San Francisco Chapter of the American Marketing Association, where I sit on the board. The talk was a huge success and well attended, but for those who were unable to make the presentation Charlene has posted her deck online through slideshare. Check it out.

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One of her key ideas is that social networks will be like air … by which she means, that your network will flow with you as you explore the future web. So as you browse Amazon, the recommendations and reviews you see will be based on your network rather than the entire user base. This has broad implications for user experience and ties in well with the Aurora Project that I worked on last year.

It also ties in well with OpenID, which is standardized format for containing  personal information, and a data-integration platform, so that you could have a single login for any authenticated site your use (Amazon, LinkedIn, Facebook, etc). Man, will that make life easier! But wait, it’s already happening.

I see this evolution as a direct result of the “web 2.0” work that is being done by zillions of companies that are starting mash-ups to connect all the “web 1.0” services out there. Essentially, these second generation companies are simply acting as bridges between the first generation service providers. As we build these bridges we’re realizing that it would be easier if we had interchangable parts. Thus, OpenID. Think of it like this, interchangable parts are to the industrial revolution what OpenID is to the internet revolution.

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