Latest Social Media News & Articles

Social media moves so fast, it's hard to keep up. Here are the week's top stories in scan-friendly format:

• FriendFeed Offers Up File Sharing
• New Zealand Mobile Facebook up 700% in Last Five Months
• Flickr Finally Embraces Twitter, Challenges TwitPic
• Small Brands Can Have Facebook Vanity URLs Also

In August of last year, the CNW Group, a provider of news and information distribution services for communication professionals, launched their social media release, the evolution of their multi-media release which includes print, audio, video and Internet and a little more.

Now they go another step in supporting the needs of communication professionals with the release of the CNW MediaRoom, an externally hosted website that integrates into a company's website, providing the ability to quickly and easily provide communications like press and social media releases.

Monday mantra: You can’t fix what you don’t measure.

At least, that’s the idea played on by Alistair Croll and Sean Power in their new book, Complete Web Monitoring. O'Reilly Media's new 662 page gem promises to show you how to transform missed opportunities, frustrated users, and spiraling costs into online success.

Said to be suitable for anyone who owns a website, Complete Web Monitoring will help you to:

• Discover how visitors use and interact with your site through web analytics, segmentation, conversions, and user interaction analysis
• Find out your market's motivations with voice-of-the-customer research
• Measure the health and availability of your website with synthetic testing and real-user monitoring
• Track communities related to your online presence, including social networks, forums, blogs, microblogs, wikis, and social news aggregators
• Understand how to assemble this data into clear reports tailored to your organization and audience

"This is a very comprehensive view of just about everything one needs to know about how websites work and what one needs to know about them. I'd like to make this book required reading for every employee at Gomez,” said Imad Mouline, CTO of Gomez.

For more information on this book, including author bios and the table of contents, check it out here. 

Social media moves so fast, it's hard to keep up. Here are the week's top stories in scan-friendly format:

• Journalists Don't See The Potential Twitter Has
• Social Network Use Growing and Growing
• EU: Social Networks Need To Beef Up Privacy Practices
• Does your CEO Participate in Social Media?

It would be an understatement to say that social media is a hot topic nowadays, including in the enterprise. You may be terrified of using it in your organization, but you really have no choice. Social media is here to stay, and you may as well embrace it rather than fight it.

Open Text (news, site) watches this trend closely and acts accordingly, in its true “candy and aspirin” fashion. Today, the vendor has announced a new addition to the Enterprise CMS platform — Open Text Social Media, which may help conservative organizations to (safely) warm up to social media.

More news coming on the second day of the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston. Socialtext (news, site) is offering their hosted social networking solution for free for organizations of up to 50 people. Along with the new free offering, they also announce the public beta of their social spreadsheet solution: SocialCalc.

Tomoye (news, site) has a new version of their Community software available as a Public Beta starting today. Tomoye Community Software 3.0 is community and social networking application that can be deployed standalone or as an add-on for Microsoft SharePoint.

We gave you an overview of the current release of the community software back in November of last year. That version offered communities based on themes, expert classification, community metrics and a SharePoint powerpack.

The latest version, also being demonstrated at the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston for the next three days, includes the ability to show information and people based on being voted most helpful or most connected. Community members also have a say on what's displayed on the community home page through voting.

That's probably not all this new version of Tomoye can do, but unless you sign up for their public beta, you can't seem to find much more information.

We'll be digging that up and bringing it to you as soon as possible. Until then, check them out at the Enterprise 2.0 conference or sign up for that public beta to see for yourself.

Get the feeling this isn't the only social networking, community announcement coming this week? Yeah, neither do we… Stay tuned!

 While most companies are frantically scrambling around, trying their hardest to throw together something—anything— that will squeeze a fortune out of the social media phenomenon, there are a select few that’ve quietly been working in the background for awhile. Sysomos, a company based in Toronto, is one example.

Sysomos’ two social media analytics tools, Media Analysis Platform (MAP) and Heartbeat, were released earlier this month after being under the hood for a whopping 3+ years. MAP is a feature-heavy tool for analyzing media conversations, and Heartbeat is like the no-frills, less expensive version for those who crave only the essentials.

In the mood for some free stuff? Of course you are. Surely banking on the idea that everyone loves to get something for nothing, Socialcast (news, site) recently announced a treat for their users: free networks.

Corporate social networks, that is. Effective immediately, employees of any company can visit Socialcast’s website and join their company’s private community using their corporate email address. Meanbwhile, administrators can enjoy free rights such as user access management and customization. The offering also comes with a handful of new features for added pizzazz.

Following just days after the release of the optional Movable Type v4.26 release, Six Apart has announced another update to the blogging and social media platform. Apparently a few bugs and some performance related database schema changes slipped through the 4.26 cracks.

Key changes in version 4.261 include:

• The Schema Version is now updated to 4.00071, which was omitted in 4.26. This change will only affect users who have already upgraded to Movable Type 4.26, not those on 4.25 and below. The schema change adds indexes to several tables.
• A typo in a 4.26 commit where a user clicks the Cancel button on the Display Options flyout did not necessarily cancel the user's actions; the 4.261 fix corrects this behavior.
• Fixed the Schwartz (MT's job queuing system) error exposed as a result of a previous 4.26 commit: 'Can't call method "registry" on an undefined value at lib/MT/Component.pm line 558 during global destruction'.

Reminder: What You Got in v4.26

In case you missed our previous coverage, here's what came with the MT 4.26 update. Remember, this release was labeled as optional by Six Apart, but we'd say that it's a must have for anyone who's flexing the platform's muscle in a meaningful way.

Bug Fixes

Aside from resolving some bugs that got through the 4.25 QA process (or were deemed too insignificant), this release was all about improving existing features — no templates or plug-ins are affected. Breath sigh of relief now.

Probably one of the biggest crowd pleasers is a fix to how lists of articles were filtered by category name. Users can now parse categories within a mt:Entries tag that include whitespace or logical operators. This bug was actually introduced in version 4.25 and made a lot of people unhappy. So for much of the user base, this is a welcome update.

Here are a few more of the bug fixes (view them all here):

• Fixes to Backup and Restore
• Fixes to a bug where the comment response did not return users to the entry
• The method for parsing the categories within an mt:Entries tag has been fixed
• Security fix for mt-wizard.cgi (this is a non-critical security fix)

Performance Enhancements

Movable Type 4.26 is a recommended update for Enterprise 4.x customers is related to the performance fixes. Specifically, there are fixes to the database indices to improve query speed which should improve search significantly and improved reliability and performance of MT's open source job queuing system, TheSchwartz.

Other low-level changes that are said to improve performance include fixes to metadata saving and unnecessary reloading of the configuration while running MT under FastCGI.

Downloading the Update

You can download Movable Type 4.261 now, but as usual, make backups before applying any changes and read the release notes to make sure this is a fix you or your clients really need.

Social media moves so fast, it's hard to keep up. Here are the week's top stories in scan-friendly format:

• When 140 Characters Can't Contain Your Tweet
• Social Media Empowering Iranian Citizen Journalists
• Facebook Grants Usernames, Crowd Goes Crazy
• Opera Aims to Re-Invent the Web With Opera Unite

Two weeks ago, everybody was talking about it. It manhandled the blogosphere, was a trending topic on Twitter, and whispers of it could still be heard coming from the mouths of various Gilbane SF attendees last week.

And, OK, we admit it; Google Wave romanced us a little, too. But now that the smoke has cleared and Wave has had ample time to settle into the ‘net, the inevitable troop of naysayers has surfaced. Let’s check out what they have to say:

Social media moves so fast, it's hard to keep up. Here are the week's top stories in scan-friendly format:

• Tools For Business Twitter Usage
• Claim Your Username on Facebook
• Social Networking on Mobiles is Hot
• Twitter Users Are Largely Anti-Social

Do you dream of building a site that's got that special Facebook mojo? You wouldn't be alone. Now you and legions of developers have it one step easier, since Facebook released its Facebook Open Platform into open source. This platform includes their API infrastructure, FQL parser, FBJS and their implementations of various methods and tags.

However, to use this code, you'll need to be aware of the Common Public Attribution License (CPAL), which the Facebook Open Platform was released under.

Social media moves so fast, it's hard to keep up. Here are the week's top stories in scan-friendly format:

• China Blocks Social Media Sites Ahead of Tienanmen Anniversary
• How Much Longer Can Social Silos Last?
• Debating Whether Social Media Drives Sales
• Havard Study Finds Twitter Behavior Split Between Men and Women
• US Navy Opens Up to Social Media Types

One of the most anticipated sessions here at Gilbane SF was the Keynote Industry Analyst Panel moderated by Frank Gilbane. Unsurprisingly, the panel revolved largely around all things social media.

As Gilbane pointed out, it is the second time in a row when this panel is "focused on social media. That fact itself is a very import thing to consider."

Teragram (news, site) is a company that has taken on the brave challenge of turning sentiment into metrics. For any company that really wants to know what users think of its products, the Sentiment Analysis Manager could be the answer.

Social media. This particular phenomenon is arguably the biggest thing on the Web right now, and it’s getting bigger every day. In fact, it’s difficult to imagine being active on the Web without somehow participating in social media.

But, on the off chance that you’ve completely missed the social media bus and you’re scrambling to figure out exactly why it’s taking the Web by storm, take solace in knowing that you’re not alone. John Stone of Crosstech Partners held a workshop at this year’s Gilbane SF Conference to explain the bare bone basics.

Statistically, Flock (news, site) is like the little browser that could, but didn’t. Translate that into numbers and you get 7.5 million people that have downloaded the browser, but only 1.1 million that actively use it.

So, why does Flock keep Flopping? Well, we’re not really sure. Dubbed the social Web browser, Mozilla-powered Flock is made up of all the things we typically love: integrated social networking, micro-blogging, chat, etc. Will the newly released 2.5 version be enough to finally take flight? Let’s take a look at the fresh features:

Both e-mail and instant messaging are pretty basic ideas. Originally designed back in the ‘60s, the two electronic earth-shakers were made to replace what we had back then: the telephone and snail mail.

Consider what we have now: blogs, wikis, collaborative documents, etc. Is it possible our faithful forms of communication are outdated? Google (news, site) thinks so. In an attempt to infuse old ideas with new technology once again, Google Wave is born. The communication service is a sort of e-mail, collaboration, instant messaging, networking mashup, and Google’s idea of what e-mail would look like if it were designed today.

As per usual for Big G, the tool is already making waves.