In a recent keynote at SXSW, Charlene Li of Forrester Research predicted that social networking platforms will be "like air" … "They will be anywhere and everywhere we need and want them to be."

More specifically, she broke down the use of such platforms into four components of utility and impact:

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• Profiles – universal identities
• Relationships – a single social graph
• Activities – a social context for activities
• Business Models – social influence as a key definer of marketing value

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Here’s an item from the NY Times about recent speculation that Yahoo may join OpenSocial, the Google-led social networking alliance that aims to bring significant degrees of openness to social networking platforms, thus (eventually) stimulating and enhancing ubiquity and pervasive use.

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Yahoo May Join Google-Led Social Networking Alliance

By Miguel Helft

Yahoo intends to join OpenSocial, a Google-led alliance that is developing a common set of standards so developers can create programs that run on many social networks and other Web sites, according to a person with direct knowledge of Yahoo’s plans.

Yahoo’s backing, which could be announced as early as this week, would bring a large base of users to the OpenSocial alliance, which is seen as a counterweight to Facebook’s successful courtship of application developers. The alliance, which was announced in the fall, already includes MySpace, Bebo and several other social networking sites.

Yahoo’s participation “would mean that the site with the largest group of users, and with the largest base of registered users, would be joining OpenSocial,” said Charlene Li, an analyst with Forrester Research.

When asked about Yahoo’s OpenSocial plans, a company spokeswoman said: “Yahoo has a rich history of supporting open standards, such as OpenID and Apache Hadoop, as we believe industry collaboration is beneficial to the developer community and the Web as a whole. While we are evaluating OpenSocial as an emerging standard, we do not comment on speculation or rumors.”

Yahoo has said it wants to speed up efforts to open its site to outside developers. Although it is not a social network, Yahoo could benefit from third party “social” applications that allow users to share, say, their favorite photos, music or movies with their friends.

Read the rest of the article here …

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I think that much of what is written here at the FASTForward blog by my colleagues also supports the distinct probability that the foundation is being created for the step-by-step (depending upon take-up and implementation) of collaboration and social computing platforms, tools and services which will redefine the dynamics of knowledge work and tie, tightly, into Charlene Li’s four key components of social networking platforms.

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