Weekly Digest of the Social Networking Space: Nov 7, 2007

I’m respecting your limited time by publishing this weekly summary, it’s great to send to busy executives.

I’ve created a new category 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. You can subscribe to this digest tag only, which filters only these type of posts.

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Web Strategy Summary
The big news? Facebook and MySpace launch advertising products at AdTech. MySpace’s Micro Targeting system is great for small businesses, and Facebook’s SocialAds leverage people and their network, although some of the community aren’t accepting this idea. News on other networks has been scarce due to these two major announcements, and coverage for this week is light.

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Advertising: Facebook and MySpace launch Ad Products
I’ve covered and weighed the pros and cons of the announcement, to be fair, not everyone agrees with our call, so you can read other opinions from Doc Searls or the many voices on Techmeme.

OpenSocial: The Alliance vs Facebook
The traffic indicates that momentum is gaining at Facebook, making the alliance a good play. There’s been reports of the API being hacked, so security continues to be an issue.

Customer Service: Facebook deletes user accounts
Jon Swift is his real name, although staff at Facebook disagrees, so much, that they’ve decided to delete his account. There needs to be an appeal system so it doesn’t have to be blogged to get attention. Didn’t Facebook click on his network to see if he had any family members with the same last name?

Segmentation: Yahoo claims College market with Kickstart
With Facebook leaving behind the exclusive college membership last year (now anyone can join, not just college students) there’s been a void for a major player to enter this space. Yahoo has launched Kickstart, a college focused social network to fill this void. Yahoo’s previous blogging/social networking platfrom Yahoo 360 has left much to be desired, let’s hope Kickstart gets going to a healthy path.

Money: Alibaba triples it’s value since IPO
China’s SMB online marketplace has recently launched ownership to the public and is being traded on Hong Kong markets. The value has tripled since it’s initial IPO, and has investors drooling. One of the few IPOs we’ve seen in this web wave and especially coming from Asia.

Segmentation: Saga Zone for over 50
If you’re over 50 and don’t want to associate with the likes of MySpacers, Saga Zone continues to gain traction. Launched 4 months ago, it already has 15,000 members.

If you have some news about the social networking industry that I missed, please leave a comment.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 7th, 2007 at 9:28 am 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.