Social Media News & Articles

We saw productivity suite provider, Zoho (news, site), attempt to get social with it earlier this year when they released their multi-platform chat program. And then again when they released embeddable gadgets for their applications.

So what makes this time different? Well, instead of a simple gadget or two, Zoho’s kicking out Zoho Projects 2.0. The latest version of their online project management and team collaboration solution is backed by a host of social features that Zoho promises will change how teams get work done. 

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

With the advent of Software as a Service (Saas), it's surprising that more browser-based options for web development don't exist. Which is what makes Platformic (news, site) so unique. Not only does it offer a browser-based web development strategy, its platform combines web design with content management.

Recently we spoke with Mark Underhill, Chief Technology Officer at Platformic about their many innovative features. The essence of Platformic 3.0 is that it lets designers, developers and laypeople use the same tools to make exciting designs, offer new media and dynamic content to users who demand it.

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.

Back in December 2007, Six Apart announced that the Movable Type (MT) blogging system was going open source. The move was greeted with enthusiasm, but the momentum never really seemed to build from that point. Now a group of ex-Six Apart staff and other MT enthusiasts have taken matters -- and the code -- into their own hands. Say hello to Open Melody. Let's have a look.

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.

 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.

Marketers have always been concerned about delivering personalized content to the right audience. And here is yet another development of a content management solution that aims to solve that problem.

This time it comes from Autonomy Interwoven (news, site ) coupled with their concept of Meaning Based Marketing (MBM).

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.

What's happening in the world of web publishing this week?

• Twitter Makes the AP Stylebook
• Scribd.com Offers eBooks
• The Chronicles of Journalism

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