Social Networks News & Articles

We said earlier in the week that we couldn’t talk about Alfresco 4 until today. Well, it’s today now and we can talk a little bit about this latest release, although only a little bit because it really is enormous. With it, Alfresco pushes its open content management platform firmly into the mobile and social space.

In October, Gartner published its list -- or rather a list -- of top ten strategic technologies. At the Gartner conference that is just finishing in Australia today, Michele Caminos of Gartner outlined 10 top trends and how they will affect infrastructure and operations.

Facebook has 700 million-plus members. LinkedIn, the business equivalent, has well over 100 million members. Twitter has a user population well in excess of 100 million as well. A business looks at these social media tools and wonders what benefits they bring to the top and bottom line.

Curated content just got more connected. Just as Google+ launches, Flipboard also rolled out a few new features, designed to enhance the way readers browse, search and share content.

Email has been getting a bad rap lately. Yes, it’s a time suck. Yes, email is inefficient and unorganized. But it’s not likely to disappear anytime soon. However, there are ways you can control the madness. Recently, 410 Labs released a Shortmail email service from private beta, making the service available to the public. Designed as an email service with a streamlined set of features, Shortmail can reduce the clutter and inefficiencies in your inbox.

The folks at ShareThis, with the little button with immense sharing capabilities, have been tracking their users and, in a recent report, revealed their sharing behaviors. In a study, put together with Starcom MediaVest Group and Rubinson Partners, ShareThis found that, among more than 300 million people a month who share links using a ShareThis button, sharing produces an estimated 10% of all Internet traffic.

IBM has published a paper on social media and where it believes it is going. While IBM (news, site) might not normally be associated with social media, the paper is the result of what is described as a web jam with over 2,700 participants over three days and from over 80 countries.

There were a number of good things released recently in the SMB space including news from Zoho that it has made its Meetings tool Mac-friendly, while WorkSimple has released a free version of its social goals management app. Blue Tie through Breeze Social helps SMBs start effective social marketing campaigns, while HP offers enterprise print management to SMBs. Research also shows that SMBs are turning their back on the desktop.

Periodically, media research checks in on women to see how they interact and engage online. This week, AOL, in partnership with Bovitz Research Group, released the findings from an industry study it commissioned in an effort to identify determining factors that influence women's choices when it comes to consuming and sharing online content.

Seems security has been high on everyone’s list of priorities this week with FaceTime releasing its Socialite software to secure social networks, and HP buying Fortify to add application security at the blueprint stage. Not surprising though, after recent research from Gartner showing security software is a priority for enterprises.

This week we examine tools that aim to balance collaboration with confidentiality, prompting individuals across the enterprise to think twice about their social signatures.

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

• RSS Dead, Twitter Done it?
• Twitter Search to Be Tweaked
• Ning Adds Applications To Social Platform
• Bit.ly Replaces TinyURL as Default Twitter Shortener
• Retailers Favoring Social Media vs. Search for Marketing

With Tom Erickson, the new CEO at the helm, great things are expected of Acquia (news, site). One of these is undoubtedly the success of Acquia Gardens. Tagged by Acquia as "Drupal for everyone" it is a web-based, mass-market approach to the open source social web content management system.

Unveiled on the company's 2009 roadmap, Acquia Gardens' aim is to let anyone build a Drupal website via the software-as-a-service (SaaS) model, with software and an IT infrastructure provided by Acquia. Though there's not much information available about the company's plans, but we scratched around a bit to see what we could find.

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.

After MySpace came along and stole Friendster’s audience and spotlight, the next big shark to-be to join the pool was Facebook. Yes, the Social Media wars had officially begun. Naturally, after the birth of and bandwagon jumping between those three players, a social network platform boom happened, with products of all shapes and sizes. Today you can say: “I want a micro social network for my business” and we’d suggest Plum as the way to go.

You could even hint at how you’ve been itching for a network based on your creepy love for bellybutton lint and we’d tell you (gingerly) to go make one and bond with other lint lovers using Ning. And now, thanks to a Stockholm-based company called FileRide, you can even dream of social networks for inanimate things like the files on your computer, and we’d still be able to point you in the right direction.