My friend Phil Wolff over at Skype Journal has been thinking about Social Network Stack - He had a great diagram there and describes it this way:

We need a new stack to sort out social media's plumbing.

Introducing the Social Stack's Six Zones of Interoperability.

* ID (Account lifecycles, Login)
* Sync (Profile, Contacts, Objects)
* Permission (Policy, Licensing)
* Find (People Search, Discovery, Gatekeepers)
* Action (Group Actions, Relationship Actions)
* Now (Alerting, Presence)

Community providers like Skype stand to gain as their architectures first recognize/design, then adopt and apply the Social Stack's standards. As with the first stack, the Social Stack will attract:

* Engineers amazed and delighted at how convenient it is to build solutions or integrate existing systems by using well documented patterns and protocols.
* Entrepreneurs hungry for the chance to build unique value atop commodity plumbing
* Capital seeking to unleash new markets
* Consumers flying to seamless onlife experiences