Nomura Research Institute, Ltd. (NRI: Tokyo; Akihisa Fujinuma, Chairman and President, CEO & COO) announces IT Road Map forecasting progress in social computing until 2013.

Social computing is a general term that describes use formats of computer systems that support and foster social interaction among people by enabling the sharing of a variety of content and activities. Social computing enables consumers to be loosely connected with other participants by sharing information through writing comments and/or reviews and entering activity records on websites, such as social networking services (SNSs), blogs, social bookmarking*1, and photo/video sharing sites.

To this day, many services aiming to provide social computing are offered as independent services on the Internet. Consequently, users need to register their own IDs and passwords for each service, and upload content (e.g., photos and videos) for each service. This has caused a problem of distributing multiple IDs and content on various websites.

However, in the future, many SNS platforms will open up their sources and enable linkages between SNSs and other social applications. In addition, ID portability (the use of a single ID for multiple services such as open ID) will be available. Such progress will enable consumers to gather and organize their social interactions and personal histories that are now scattered in many locations on the web. As a result, consumers will be able to have a more consistent experience by easily combining and managing services, content and conversations with other people on the web. In their consumption behaviors, they will increasingly pay attention to the experiences of those who interact with them.

The development of open platforms in social computing and the diffusion of ID portability will also change the relationships between companies and consumers. If companies gather and analyze information on social interactions and behaviors of consumers that are now dispersed for each service, they will be better able to understand the consumption and communication activities of individual consumers on the web, enabling them to provide services that are more appropriate.

	2008 – 2009: Start of loose linkages among services The adoption of OpenID (a single ID is used for authenticating multiple services on the web) will lead to the beginning of a federation of social computing service providers. OpenID utilizes a URL as a user’s ID. This URL-based ID can be used for authentication for other sites that support OpenID. Starting this year, OpenID is being increasingly adopted by major portal sites and SNSs that have many customer IDs such as mixi and Yahoo!.
	2010 – 2011: Spreading phase of social computing A number of services that are compatible with open social computing platforms such as OpenSocial*2 and Facebook Platform*3 will enter the market. In this era, once an application is developed, application developers will be able to deploy the application for a variety of SNSs. In the future, because applications will be in wider circulation, Internet users will be able to use an abundance of social applications. If consumers start using social applications more frequently and on various occasions, needs for data portability, i.e., “I want to freely move and process my own data,” will arise among them. From around this period, data portability will gradually be realized. In the early stages, however, the types of data that could be portable are limited.
	In and after 2012: Social data will become portable among a wide variety of services Around this period, data portability will enter the diffusion phase, and it will become common for consumers to move their data among different services. Consumers will be able to collect data about their own activities as necessary without being confined to the particular services to which they belong. As a result, consumers will benefit from recommendations for optimized content and services based on a comprehensive understanding of their own experiences on the web. For companies that provide goods and services to consumers, it will become important to provide services by understanding not only the consumption behaviors related to services provided by respective companies, but also the social behaviors of consumers. Accordingly, the importance of social computing will also increase among companies in the future. *1: Social bookmarking: Social bookmarking is a service for Internet users to store bookmarks online and share them with others. *2: OpenSocial: OpenSocial is a set of common application programming interfaces (APIs) to develop social applications. It was proposed by Google in November 2007. *3: Facebook Platform: Facebook Platform is a development framework that enables users to develop applications that interact with Facebook. This framework was provided by Facebook in May 2007. IT Road Map: The IT road map is designed to provide NRI’s forecasts of trends in information technology over the next five years with the purpose of supporting companies in making decisions on IT strategies. NRI’s Information Technology Research Department publishes this report semiannually.