I'm prepping slides for my talk on Friday at the Emerging Communications Conference (starting tomorrow, discount code Skypejournal08). I'm starting to describe how many types of services are coming together as a new infrastructure.

Once upon a time...

You may be old enough to remember a time after Sneakernet, before the Internet, when people started cabling computers to each other. Manufacturers like IBM, Digital, and Wang invented their own combination of networking hardware and software. Massive customer lock-in as your computers could only talk to other computers from the same manufacturer.

Then in 1972 ANSI drafted what would become the ISO Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) Basic Reference Model. The model divided networks up into a "stack" with seven layers (like a stack of pancakes):

The OSI Layers
• 7: Application
• 6: Presentation
• 5: Session
• 4: Transport
• 3: Network
• 2: Data Link
• 1: Physical

A few principles made this amazingly successful:

1. Each layer does work of a specific type, and sticks to it.
2. A layer gets services (defined through protocols) from the layer below it.
3. A layer provides services to the layer above it. 

This abstraction and separation encouraged:

• specialization by companies within those specialties
• competition by vendors in a layer
• innovation within layers

All without breaking the stack. Or your network.

The competition improved all the components of the network stack until iteration and evolutionary pressure stabilized most of it.

Thesis: We're at a similar point in history.

We need a new stack to sort out social media's plumbing.

Introducing the Social Stack's Six Zones of Interoperability.

• ID (Account lifecycles, Login)
• Sync (Profile, Contacts, Objects)
• Permission (Policy, Licensing)
• Find (People Search, Discovery, Gatekeepers)
• Action (Group Actions, Relationship Actions)
• Now (Alerting, Presence)

Community providers like Skype stand to gain as their architectures first recognize/design, then adopt and apply the Social Stack's standards. As with the first stack, the Social Stack will attract:

• Engineers amazed and delighted at how convenient it is to build solutions or integrate existing systems by using well documented patterns and protocols.
• Entrepreneurs hungry for the chance to build unique value atop commodity plumbing
• Capital seeking to unleash new markets
• Consumers flying to seamless onlife experiences

We'll talk about the stack, its components and how they interact at

• Mar 12, 2008: Emerging Communications (eComm) 2008 
• Mar 20, 2008: DataPortability Meetup at Six Apart 
• Apr 18, 2008: The Data Sharing Workshop
• Apr 22, 2008: Web 2.0 Expo
• May 12, 2008: IIW - Internet Identity Workshop
• Jun 16, 2008: Supernova 2008

This is a draft, a work in progress, so please kibitz in the Skype Journal Skype chat or DataPortability.org's Technical Group's Skype chat room.