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.

Need to make decisions about your web strategy? I’m here to help: subscribe to my blog, sign up for emails (right nav), follow me on Twitter, or add me on Facebook (I’ll add you back for each).

Thank you for the feedback and comments last week, (I asked if I should continue this series) In addition to comments, I received emails, and messages in Facebook telling me to continue the digest, which I will do. Here’s my attempt at listening to you, my customers!

Web Strategy Summary
Facebook, all the current rage, continues to offer more features, including a groups type feature which could further refine a users’ privacy. More money flows into the space, as investors grab onto the application and platform market. If you’re not doing it already, keep an eye on how money is flowing into and out of this space. I continue to recommend to the web strategist to develop a widget or distributed program, there are communities emerging outside of your domain.

---

Feature: Facebook to release contact groups
Nick O’Neill claims that contact groups would be the killer app to put LinkedIn away, giving members the ability to create multiple views for different folks on their networks. We’ve discussed before there are at least 3 major personas people wish to share online: professional (often public), personal (friends), and intimate (family). For the flip view, Donna questions O’Neil’s exuberance. Me? The multi-graph social graph would certainly aid us as we continue to share online.

Global: Xing, grows in Europe and Asia
German based Xing, which has 4 million registered members, is being compared to Asia and Europe’s version of Linked, Facebook vs Xing. The feature set? a business networking site with personal content. The German version of Blognation indicates that Xing offers many areas for a member to list their profile information –even of other SoNets.

Money: $25 Mil fund created for Development of Sales Force Apps
SalesForce is a SoNet too, and investors want to get in on the action. A team of investors is launching a 25 million dollar fund for the development of applications that sit on top of this Social Network from SalesForce called Force.com.

Money: Google acquires Zingku, Mobile SoNet
Never heard of Zingku, have you? Google acquires this SoNet which lets users transmits messages and media from mobile phones to friends. This after dodgeball, which seems somewhat similar in features. With rumors of Google launching a smart phone, this could be a likely software to power it.

Feature: Track memes and ideas in Twitter
A new feature that let’s you track all mentions of a particular word or meme, rather than just a person. This could provide more utility for those that are responsible for watching certain markets, products, or even emergency use

Global: SoNets reach 50% of German population
Comscore reports that almost half of all Germans are using social networks. The top sites? MySpace, followed by StudiVZalso, JUX.DE, then PICZO.com.

Widget: Development “toolkits” now emerging
Widgetbox offers a service that helps speed up the deployment of Facebook widgets through registration, development and step by step walk throughs. Soon, the hope is, everyone will know someone who can deploy. The real trick however is to think of the other social networks that will open up the application platform, Facebook is just the first of many to come

Feature: LinkedIn’s Profile Pic, Answers, and Groups
One of the most dominant business networking tools (at least for those that want to connect) released a feature that helps to personalize their profile, the profile picture. LinkedIn has also upgraded it’s ‘groups’ feature and Himash enjoys answering the questions in their own ‘answers’ feature.

Usage: Schools use Facebook to alert students
During the given examples in this article, schools used Facebook to alert students to masked gunmen and other potential threats. Makes sense right? Use the tools of communication that your audience already has adopted.

Value: Dollar per user Valuation of Facebook
Charlene Li, my colleague breaks down dollar by user ratios of what Facebook is worth and compares it too overall spend, when you look at this in the right light, the value of Facebook in the $10 Billion+ range is feasible.

Adoption: Slide, a media widget, has rapid growth
Slide, which let’s users create slideshows and movie like media from photos is having tremendous growth, and even overtaking Flickr in New Zealand. Not sure why they compared it to flickr, as it’s not the top photo sharing site out there, it’s just common in the social media circles.

FUD: Potential Facebook Investor Steve Ballmer of Microsoft Quivers
Steve suggests that new tools adopted by youths are potentially a “Fad”. If this is what he thinks, then he should continue to consider investing in Facebook as the largest adoption rates are being done by white collar workers over 30. The rich profile and segmented advertising opportunities Microsoft can leverage are very valuable. For what it’s worth, he’s right about the youth, they should and will always be elusive, that’s the whole point. Former Microsoft employee Robert Scoble suggests Ballmer doesn’t get it.

I’ve linked to this before, but if you’re looking for a Facebook conference, former colleague (and still friend) Scoble has a running list.