Weekly Digest of the Social Networking Space: Sept 19, 2007 (comments requested)

I’m respecting your limited time by publishing this weekly summary.

I’ve created a new tag called Digest where you can start to track and access these going forward. The hope? To make it easy for a web strategist to quickly scan the activity in the last week. I strive to make headlines on items categorized and succinct.

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Web Strategy Summary
This week, we’re seeing more players enter the platform space, advertisers gearing up for deployment and thoughtful theory and commentary about real applications and platforms. Expect to see more mashups between networks as data (and profiles) become shared. I’m pleased to see more coverage around other SoNets besides Facebook.

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Facebook: Adoption, Viablity, and Growth
This is the Social Network that is getting the most buzz, in fact Facebook is starting to get traction here in Hong Kong I’m told that “Adoption went from 50k to 100k in two weeks in Sept”. Brian Solis believes Facebook to be a legitimate social network for business. New York times launches a “news trivia” widget for Facebook, part of it’s Web Strategy to embrace the new web. (and they’re going to stop requiring payment for their online site)

Theory: Sociology applied to Social Networks
Bernard breaks down the value of Social Networks, and weighs the value between gated and open communities and the balance between trust and openness.

Profiles: Yahoo Mash demographics not for you?
Scott Karp challenges the juvenile profile selections that Yahoo’s lastest social networking platform “Mash” provides. Or maybe it’s self-selecting the users they want.

Enterprise: Faceforce Sonets for the Enterprise
This mashup between Facebook’s profile system and SalesForce application AppExchange platform allows for a unique opportunity for collaboration between both systems.

Funding: Facebook raises 10 Mil for Widgets
A Facebook fund has been created that will invest in companies who want to build applications on thier platform, up to $25,000-$250,000 could be provided per development group. Google did something similar this summer, in any case, outsourcing development to the community is likely most cost effective than hiring folks to do it.

Web Usage: A third of Personal Data is Bogus
When users upload data to Social Networks, up to 31% of them enter false information. As a strategist, we should always anticipate this in our models of gathering intelligence.

Layoffs: Eons reduces staff
Eons, which is aimed for a community of members over fifty years of age has trimmed 24 employees. This is one of the first companies in this space I’ve heard of that had that many headcount reductions.

Funding: Viacom invests 40mil into Flux
This partnership between Viacom and Tagworld to create a social network for Viacom brands and others using Flux.

Advertising: Yahoo has a play with Bebo
Apparently Yahoo’s first major play on Social Networking Advertising (see above about Mash), they will deliver on Bebo UK and Ireland, a popular social network.

Mobile: Social Networks for Phones
Techcrunch lists out an index of social networks for the mobile phone. I really hope this technology integrates with other networks in mind, from an address book to a Facebook account.

Funding: Facebooks Ad Provider raises 500k
SocialMedia, the ad provider of Facebook raises half a million and plans to expand to also expand to MySpace.

Features: Digg to adopt Social Network Features
Popular user-voted stories on Digg have been an impact in the web community. Like-minded users will be able to find similar web users to network, share, and find additional useful content as Digg to deploy social networking features.

I’m considering stopping this weekly digest as I’m not seeing the indicators that this is helpful to you. I’m also watching analytics and don’t see a tremendous amount of attention spent on these posts (although measuring a blog is difficult, as all posts are on homepage) so I really need your feedback. Are these digest posts helpful?

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 19th, 2007 at 1:09 pm and is filed under Digest, Social Networking. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.