Social Networking, Social Engagement News & Guidance

Kentico (news site), a Czech vendor of web content management solutions built on ASP.NET, has just announced details of its 4.1 version, scheduled for release next August.

Founder and CEO Petr Palas, on Kentico’s blog, said this latest version carries a full text search engine based on Lucene.NET as well as improvements on the current engine based on SQL queries.

Riding the CQ 5 and CRX momentum waves, Day Software (site, news) just released CQ 5.2 featuring new Social Collaboration (SoCo) and Digital Asset Management (DAM) applications.

While marrying web content management with social media, web 2.0 and DAM is hardly revolutionary -- nowadays, it’s more about execution than the idea itself.

Communities are fast becoming an important part of any business strategy -- whether they are internal communities, customer communities, partner communities or some combination thereof.

The choices on technical solution are numerous -- a recent Forrester report indicated there were over 100 community solutions in the marketplace today. This probably doesn't include solutions that come as part of a web content management platform. While we won't review all of them, CMSWire will take a look at some of the more well-known, and some not so well known solutions.

We encourage your feedback on our review process and suggestions for products to review. Submit your ideas to editorial team (contact info here).

The first community solution review we have for you hails from Sabre Holdings -- these are the guys who bring us Travelocity and all those airline reservation systems we love to hate.

Recently released to the general public, cubeless is a hosted internal -- or corporate -- community solution. It is a simple community solution without all the functionality you typically see in the more well-known offerings, but that doesn't mean its not worth looking at. In fact, it may mean just the opposite -- depending on your requirements.

Those who are struggling with tracking (and participating in) what their community is doing across many different social networks now have a new tool at their disposal.

This tool is Motion, which you install on top of Movable Type Pro and use to create a deeper relationship with and understanding of your community.

A year or so ago we asked if Bebo (site) was the future of social networking. Then we logged into our Facebook account and forgot about them entirely.

What to do when customers aren't flocking to your site as much as the others? Create a platform that keeps users updated with any information they have registered to receive from anywhere on the web, including rival social media websites. That's what. And that's exactly was Bebo has done.

Long known as an open source web content management system, Drupal (news, site) has also recently been referring to their solution as social publishing software. Most web content management systems have some sort of social computing capabilities built-in now -- it's almost mandatory these days.

It hasn't exactly been clear though how you use Drupal to create social computing solutions, until now. Packt Publishing has come out with a new book in their Drupal series that teaches us just that -- how to build social networking sites with Drupal.

There was a time when all we heard about were social networking solutions lovingly termed "Facebook for the Enterprise". We don't hear that much anymore and there's a reason for it. Enterprises are getting smarter about how social computing solutions can be leveraged and they are much more resistant to the belief that Facebook-like participation is possible or even necessary.

CMSWire had the opportunity to speak with J.B. Holston, CEO and President of NewsGator, on the topic of enterprise social computing and how solutions like their RSS engine -- now called Social Sites Professional -- is changing the face of social computing for enterprises today.

When CMSWire spoke with Reality Digital on the state of social media and SaaS-based solutions, CEO Cynthia Francis hinted that big news was coming in the near future. Well that future has arrived in the form of a self-service white-label social media platform for the small to mid-sized business called Reality Digital Harmony.

Kentico Software, a Czech Web CMS vendor, released a new version of Kentico CMS for ASP.NET. The 4.0 version, out of beta announced in December of last year, brings to the table Web content management packaged with social networking.
 
The majority of new Kentico CMS 4.0 features are revolving around the oh-so-popular social networking, online communities and Web 2.0 technologies.

CMSWire applauds those that take a current solution and put it on its head. Worio, a small search engine, isn't your traditional search engine, in that it all it does is find what you're looking for. While it can do that, Worio also aims to find the things you didn't even know you were looking for.

They call it a discovery-engine and it blends social media with algorithms that use user behavior as data points, rather than end points. For the past six months, they've been working hard to provide you with a broad range of discoveries related to the topics you search for daily on the Web. Today they announced that they have increased their discovery index from less than 10 million Web pages to "a critical mass" of 100 million since opening its public beta last July.

 According to a new study released by comScore, more European mobile phone users are being drawn into using the mobile web. Many new adopters of mobile Internet usage are utilizing social networking websites.

In fact, almost one third of respondents reported that they exclusively viewed mobile social networking content, showing mobile devices are becoming a very popular way to keeping in touch with one's social connections.

World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) released a report on the future of social networking. Based on a workshop convened by the W3C in January, which attempted to bring together industry actors to foster discussion, analyze risks and opportunities of the social networking industry and define plans for the future of the industry. 

If you're mom has started using Facebook then you won't find this recent report surprising at all.

According to the Pew Internet and American Life project, who released a report on Adults and Social Networking Services, "adult Internet users who have a profile on an online social network site has more than quadrupled in the past four years -- from eight percent in 2005 to 35 percent."

As lifestreaming continues to grow in popularity, so do the ways in which it’s presented. Introducing one of the first players to take the sentimental route: thisMoment.

Still in its beta testing phase, thisMoment isn’t marketed as a lifestream, a micro-blogging service or a social network, even though it could easily be used for any of those things. No, thisMoment is presented as something a little closer to the heart. Specifically, “A place for saving and sharing the moments of your life.” 

A funny thing that’s developed in the last few years is a shared interest in the latest trends by teens and adults. At least, we’re made to think it’s a tad odd, and surely greasy-faced adolescents are horrified at the thought of getting an add request from their parents on MySpace.

But at the same time, when it comes to things as explosive and powerful as social networking, is a shared interest really all that strange? After all, adults are people too, and as Pew Internet & American Life Project reports, their motives for joining a network are a little more colorful than one might think.