Knowledge may be power, but this knowledge is distributed throughout social networks of people. Without ways of building the Social Web into a first-class citizen of the Web, we will never be able to "program the social computer" to solve large-scale social problems.
After the W3C Workshop on the Future of Social Networking in Barcelona, for over a year the Social Web Incubator Group has been meeting on a weekly basis to overview the space and craft a strategy for the W3C.
The results are grim...
And all this work is happening outside the W3C, and needs to be co-ordinated with the core of the Web to solve the problem of security.
The Social Web XG's Final Report is the first (30 page) description of (more-or-less) the entire Social Web, from identity, profiles, social media, privacy, activity, and emerging work...
W3C will re-invigorate privacy and digital identity with new resources, hosting workshops to gather requirements for Web Identity from eGov and e-Commerce, and may start a Working Group in this area. The "Community Group" proposal implements most of the structural changes necessary to make the W3C suitable for future social web work, and the W3C will provide resources for the next round of the Federated Social Web effort as a new Community Group.