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Social Computing Reading List I. Broad Marketing/Business Theory Focused The Cluetrain Manifesto Christopher Locke The Purple Cow Seth Godin The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More Chris Anderson The Age of Conversation Gavin Heaton and Drew McLellan Meatball Sundae: Is Your Marketing Out of Sync? Seth Godin The Open Brand Kelly Mooney and Nita Rollins II. Consumer Behavior/Case Study Focused Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die Chip Heath & Dan Heath Naked Conversations: How Blogs are Changing the Way Businesses Talk with Customers (Kindle Edition) Robert Scoble Join the Conversation: How to Engage Marketing Weary Consumers with the Power of Community, Dialogue and Partnership Joseph Jaffe Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution Howard Rheingold III. Tactical Focused Word of Mouth Marketing: How Smart Companies Get People Talking Andy Sernovitz Citizen Marketers: When People are the Message Ben McConnell and Jackie Huba   Posted by Brook Miller on April 8, 2008

The country's leading online retailer has been doing a lot of things right lately, and Goldman Sachs' James Mitchell thinks that the future will only get better for Amazon. He sees sales growing at an annualized clip of more than 20% over the next decade. The buy rating on Goldman's conviction list pegs a $98 price target on the stock.

1. Retail's weakness is Amazon's gain

2. Amazon is a triple threat in digital delivery

Goldman analyst James Mitchell set a buy rating and $98-a-share target price on Amazon's stock, saying the company has been doing well by exploring business routes aside from its traditional online methods such as the Kindle, an electronic book-reading device.

Mitchell said Amazon is seen as being able to sustain its revenue growth longer that most other Internet retailers, and that the company's revenue growth rate in the past quarter matched that of Google Inc.

OAuth and OpenID OAuth is not an OpenID extension and at the specification level, shares only few things with OpenID – some common authors and the fact both are open specification in the realm of authentication and access control. ‘Why OAuth is not an OpenID extension?’ is probably the most frequently asked question in the group. The answer is simple, OAuth attempts to provide a standard way for developers to offer their services via an API without forcing their users to expose their passwords (and other credentials). If OAuth depended on OpenID, only OpenID services would be able to use it, and while OpenID is great, there are many applications where it is not suitable or desired. Which doesn’t mean to say you cannot use the two together. OAuth talks about getting users to grant access while OpenID talks about making sure the users are really who they say they are. They should work great together.

Is OAuth a New Concept? No. OAuth is the standardization and combined wisdom of many well established industry protocols. It is similar to other protocols currently in use (Google AuthSub, AOL OpenAuth, Yahoo BBAuth, Upcoming API, Flickr API, Amazon Web Services API, etc). Each protocol provides a proprietary method for exchanging user credentials for an access token or ticker. OAuth was created by carefully studying each of these protocols and extracting the best practices and commonality that will allow new implementations as well as a smooth transition for existing services to support OAuth. An area where OAuth is more evolved than some of the other protocols and services is its direct handling of non-website services. OAuth has built in support for desktop applications, mobile devices, set-top boxes, and of course websites. Many of the protocols today use a shared secret hardcoded into your software to communicate, something which pose an issue when the service trying to access your private data is open source.