Weekly Digest of the Social Networking Space: June 18, 2008

I took a few weeks off from doing this digest, after my Hawaii vacation, but am now back in the groove. If anyone wants to contribute to this on an ongoing weekly basis as a guest editor, let me know.

I’m respecting your limited time by publishing this weekly digest on the Social Networking space, which I cover as an Industry Analyst.

I’ve created a new category called Digest (view archives). Start with the Web Strategy Summary, then quickly scan the succinct and categorized headlines, read text for my analysis, and click link to dive in for more.

You can subscribe to this digest tag only, which filters only these posts tagged digest.

Web Strategy Summary
I’m mainly stirred to write this post as two major occurances have woken me back up: LinkedIn acquires quite a bit of cash, (I met with Dan the CEO last week) and MySpace is trying a different strategy to monetize. As usual, more verticals for social networks appear, and cultures continue wrestle with the impact of these tools.

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Funding: LinkedIn gains 53 Million in new investing, valued at 1 billion.
What will they do with this money? Go shopping for a competitor to beef up their portfolio, or move into the enterprise 2.0 space with collaborative tools –or both.

Redesign: In a struggle to monetize, MySpace redesigns –ready for brands
Social networks (aside from LinkedIn) are struggling to monetize, myspace, the very cluttered self expression network is now redesigning it’s site, making it easier for brands to advertise and market.

Awareness (White Label) partners with Sharepoint
Awareness is opening it’s doors, making it compatible with CMS/Collaboration tool Sharepoint, which needs ’social’ features to compete in this market. Expect large companies to make acquisitions in the white label space in the near future.\

White label: yet another launch, Soceeo, Dotster
Soceo launches it’s white label solution (so any brand can have their own Facebook), as well as Dotster, you can already see the very crowded space due to commodity technologies.

Asia: Facebook clones appear
Social networking features are a commodity, that’s why there are so many white label vendors. In this article, it discusses how some are directly copying the success of Facebook and creating their own versions.

Aggregation: Ways to easily follow your friends on the web
Content has fragmented on the web, it’s difficult to find all the conversations your friends and colleagues may be having, this list of tools indicates a growing trend of aggregators.

Culture: Is it bad manners to not friend a requester
I’ve heard of some employees feeling very cautious about adding their boss to their myspace of facebook account –with great reason. Explore what proper netiqqutte is and what’s not.

Verticals: Social Network for Truckers
Layover.com, MyTruckingSpace.com emerge for the transportation professional, I’ve seen examples of these in nearly every vertical and niche.

Verticals: Social Networks for everyone
This 50 most odd social networks listed out by Cnet shows some communities for nearly every niche possible, from medical, sports, babies, and even the deceased.

If I’ve missed a key article or post, leave a comment below.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 18th, 2008 at 6:24 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.