Social Networks News & Articles

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.

Microblogging is growing at an exceedingly rapid rate. As a result, more and more services pop-up regularly trying to corner the microblog front. The newest of these microblog innovators is Buzzable. Buzzable brings the idea of having your own social network and applies it to microblogging.

Since we’re sure the added French and German language packs to Bitrix Site Manager earlier this month got you all ridiculously excited, you’d better brace yourselves because hot on the tails of that update is their new Social Network Module.

Those that have kept up-to-date with the technology headlines know that we are being treated to a trifecta of mobile phone gadgetry that our grandparents likely never dreamed possible. There are also plenty of new and impressive consumer electronics products on the rise. So with times of such technological progress in full swing, why is newly released research pointing towards less adoption of these devices and the services available on them?

It took way too long, but after Forrester Research conducted a 2008 poll, the group has come to the conclusion that social media activity is now mainstream. Okay, so this news is not as shocking as one would expect, but look at sites like MySpace, Facebook, Twitter and FriendFeed for crying out loud. It is obvious that this stuff has gone mainstream. Regardless, the statistics are interesting to review, and that is exactly what we are going to do.

Flock, the self-proclaimed Social Web browser, recently released version 2.0 with a few notable upgrades, including the integration of their most requested service, MySpace.

That’s right, you read that correctly, the browser that relies on social networking for popularity and downloads just integrated the biggest social network of all.

Good for Google = good for the universe. What would a social network be without applications, you ask? Nowadays, probably obsolete; which is why the ambitious, sort-of-new social network Ning made a good move by announcing their support of Google’s OpenSocial v0.7 standard.

This will allow developers to easily build applications that can also be shared across a variety of other supporting social platforms.

These days the words “financing” and “New York investors” doesn’t exactly stir up our most noble emotions. But in this case, it’s a good thing.

Salesconx is an online marketplace and expert network for selling and business referrals. They’ve just announced receipt of US$ 1.5 million in Series A financing. This load of dough came from a consortium of New York investors with broad experience in building successful companies.

Oh those young persons! How they love their social networks.

New research results indicate that millenials (those born between 1981 and 2000) are also eager to embrace mobile Web 2.0 technologies, which include cell phone-based blogging, multimedia sharing, location-based socialization services, gaming and chat.

Seems like we can’t get enough of that Facebook social network these days. Not only do we constantly hear about all the consumer-based solutions that want to emulate and even overrun it, we now have to contend with vendor after vendor offering their enterprise 2.0 version of the popular social networking platform.

Trampoline Technologies SONAR Dashboard is the latest in a string of solutions for an “enterprise Facebook”. While we don’t discount the need for social networking inside the enterprise, we just really wish someone would think of a better marketing pitch.

Social network sites like MySpace and Facebook started an infectious desire from the public for more social-ness on the internet. The people were tired of chat rooms and IM just wasn’t cutting it. So the social network crazy started.

But MySpace and Facebook aren’t the only social networks out there…