. We can expect a similar wave of companies instrumenting social media and mobile applications,

manage the lookup service that allows individuals and businesses to find and connect to each other? The phone and email address books will eventually merge with the data from social networks to provide a rich set of identity infrastructure services

Building a social network to rival Facebook or Twitter is far less important to the future of the Internet platform than creating facilities that will allow third-party developers to leverage the social data that companies like Google, Microsoft, Yahoo!, AOL - and phone companies like ATT, Verizon and T-Mobile - have produced through years or even decades of managing user's social data for communications.

Whoever cracks this code, providing frameworks that make it possible for applications to be functionally social without being socially promiscuous, will win

Don't assume that advertising will continue to be the only significant way to monetize internet content in the years ahead

The question is the extent to which platform companies will use their advertising capabilities as a system service. Will they treat these assets as the source of competitive advantage for their own products, or will they find ways to deploy advertising as a business model for developers on their platform?

Location is the Internet data subsystem that is furthest along in its development as a system service accessible to all applications

We thus see convergence between Location and social media concepts like Activity Streams. Platform providers that understand and exploit this intersection will be in a stronger position than those who see location only in traditional terms.

This need for speed is going to be a major driver of platform services; individual applications will have difficulty keeping up.

Picasa and Flickr are no longer just consumer image sharing sites: they are vast repositories of tagged image data that can be used to train algorithms and filter results.

This idea of Government as a Platform is a key focus of my advocacy about Government 2.0.

It is to say, rather than ask what are we good at and what else can we do with that skill, you ask, who are our customers? What do they need? And then you say we're going to give that to them regardless of whether we currently have the skills to do so, and we will learn those skills no matter how long it takes.

But the physical book really has had a 500-year run. It's probably the most successful technology ever. It's hard to come up with things that have had a longer run. If Gutenberg were alive today, he would recognize the physical book and know how to operate it immediately. Given how much change there has been everywhere else, what's remarkable is how stable the book has been for so long. But no technology, not even one as elegant as the book, lasts forever.

For people who are readers, reading is important to them. And you don't want to read for three hours on a backlit LCD screen. It's great for short form. This is a really important point—that we humans co-evolve with our tools. We change the tools, and the tools change us, and that cycle repeats.

They are careful to explain things.