I'm sitting in the audience of a Web Guild event called called "The Future of Online Platforms"

I'll post a bit about the discussion as it evolves:

Ismael Ghalimi, CEO, Intalio is moderating the event.

My big question for these guys is "what about the network effects" for the vendors on these platforms. For example, if vendor A added a widget to Salesforce and vendor B added a widget to Salesforce, could vendor C take advantage of both the platform and what was added by vendors A and B? This is something that my company, Teqlo, does solve. So far, I don't think Salesforce can do this.

Why is Salesforce a Platform

Mark Trang, Director of ISV Marketing, SalesForce.com: "Our long term vision is to let any company manage all their data on demand". If you build it on Excel today, you should think about buiding on

Is Google a Platform?

Chris Schalk, Google Developer Programs, Google: No... the web is the platform. They have services to power mashups.

Why is Rearden a Platform?

Chuck Mortimore, Director of Platform Services, Rearden Commerce: The issue isn't the "platform"... the issue is that services that are now being delivered are actually things that people care about.

Chuck touches on the importances of the "network effect". Rearden is 700+ customers and thousands of suppliers.

It looks like Rearden is planning on letting 3rd parties provide mashups that combine the suppliers

When will I be able to use the Apex to build my a complete application?

Mark kinds of dodges the question... sorry Mark. He says you do not have to use only Salesforce. You can build some of the app yourself, and the rest of the data store.

Mark mentioned, however that they are going to be announcing more soon.

My friend is building an app on Ruby on Rails... will Google help if he gets successful?

Chris Schalk says they will support scale with Mashups that leverage the Google apps... but no real back end.

As an aside, if you build a rock star app on top of Rails, and you need to scale to Twitter scale, then you need Joyent's Accelarator for Applications.

Chuck says that what all 3 of the vendors provide a path to success, because they provide demand for your product.... and provide it fast.

I'm not sure I agree with Chuck on this. Zoho, which rocks, has only a few thousand users on Facebook. Not everyone who sells through a hub and scope "platform" play, such as Salesforce or Facebook, actually manages to take advantage of the platform.

Ismael is asking about Single Sign-on - why has it not been solved

Chuck says it a hard problem, and therefore really hard to solve. He thinks that the people who solve the problem will be OpenID.

Aside from me, Is Google going to participate in OpenID? It would be really nice to see more companies support the OpenID standard. I have used it a few times and really like it.

Chuck says the ideal would be a mashup server that uses your ID on your behalf at 3rd party services.

Salesforce solves this because all the 3rd party AppExchange applications inherit the user's general Salesforce ID. Very useful. Personally, I wish more companies would expose this ID this way. Facebook does. LinkedIn doesn't.