Social Web News & Articles

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

• ICQ Launches New Client With Real time Features
• Study: Social Networks Not Keeping Students Up At Night
• Majority Of Internet Users Use Social Media
• Internet Explorer Declared Unsafe By Germany, France

Everyone knows that there are idealists, and there are pragmatists, and the two don't mix. Right? Well, the world is rarely that black and white. Want proof? A key name in the history of open source and the open web has just gone to work for a company-devouring corporation.

Improving developer culture is kind of a hot ticket right now, and extra focus on the cogs of that has been apparent in recent months from platforms like EMC, Joomla! and Plone.

Real time search startup OneRiot (news, site) cut themselves a slice of the action this week by launching the OneRiot Developer Network (ORDN). Acting as a watering hole, the new meeting place will serve as an excellent starting point for third party developers, sustaining those with important API questions, or those who just want to connect/start a specific conversation. 

OneRiot Developer Network

Leading the project is Robert Reich, co-founder of OneRiot. Considering the fact that the last time Reich had his hands in a community it went on to become the third largest meet-up in the country, we think it's fair to assume a lot of people are expecting great things from the new network.

Nasdaq-listed RightNow buys HiveLive (news, site) to show there's still life in the M&A market. What now for the enterprise community site?

RightNow does social-focused CRM for enterprises and has expanded its presence with the capture of HiveLive and its customer engagement-focused products. The combined product will be available in November, but new customers can still start using HiveLive while existing customers remain unaffected.

The purchase for US$ 6 million does not quite match the US$ 7.6 million invested by venture capital partners. Even so, HiveLive was doing something right -- it managed to rack up some kudos in the near-two years of live product, notching up Gartner Cool Vendor status last year and picking up both Adobe and EDR as customers over the summer.

HiveLive's key component was the Hive, a community building tool for blogs, wikis and other content. Using the Hive, companies could create their own social sites on-demand to attract users, encourage stickiness and improve revenue.

The acquisition allows RightNow to broaden its offering and meet the increasing demands of clients wanting fast and easy social features for their own sites, projects or products.

The RightNow side of the equation, Cloud Monitor (and its service, marketing and sales solutions), will help convert the input from HiveLive into CRM-actionable data and a better experience for customers of its 1,900 plus client companies.

Helping Microsoft put a little bit of social search goodness in its Internet Explorer 8 must have helped OneRiot (news, site) garner a little more attention.

The real time web search startup has just picked up some Series C financing to the tune of US$ 7 million. The funding was led by OneRiot's current venture capital firms: Appian Ventures, Commonwealth Capital Ventures and Spark Capital.

The plans for this new funding involve continual enhancement of the OneRiot core product, in addition to efforts to support partners like Microsoft and Yahoo who use the OneRiot API.

The OneRiot Hot Web Topics Internet Explorer 8 add-on is an IE8 web slice offering real time web search results on the most discussed topics on the social web.

With over 3 millions users opted in to share their information with OneRiot, they are able to provide the hottest topics currently being discussed via sites like Twitter and Digg. It does this using their PulseRank algorithm which determines the current social buzz on web content mentioned within these social services -- based on their community.

OneRiot real time web search

Obviously OneRiot must be doing something right to get their venture capital firms to cough up more money for development. As they say on their blog, "Yes, we're really happy about this."

It hasn’t been an easy year for anyone in the Content Management industry, so it really wasn't too much of a shock that earlier this month it was announced that Vignette (news, site) was being taken over by Open Text (news, site) and that they had a year-on-year first quarter drop off in revenue of 24.2% to US$ 33.9m.

Everyone’s feeling the pain and Vignette’s Q1 results were just a continuation of a trend that saw their total 2008 revenues drop-off by 11.6% over 2007.

But its not how you behave in the good times that marks you out as a market leader, its how you respond to difficulties and Vignette appears to be tackling the current economic downturn head-on.

There's been a lot of talk about social networking. It's big, getting bigger and there's no telling what it will grow up to be.

As a result, Webtrends (news, site) wants to make sure we monitor our status against it. In addition, the company unlocks access to customer data through no-fee API access. Enter Webtrends Open Exchange. 

There are many out there attempting to rule the face of social web and provide an answer to the time consuming-ness of being social on the internet. Names such as Google, Facebook, and FriendFeed have been at the forefront lately. Enter stage left…SocialThing, the newest contender to facilitate being social online.

Bob Bickel of Ringside Networks is always sending interesting stuff to my trusty Thunderbird.
His latest exposition is a timely call to arms regarding the Social Web, and is worth five minutes of any Webmaster’s time. In essence, Bob’s argument is that some version of open social (all rights reserved, Google Corp.) is happening, and that all you Webmasters are going to be dancing in the streets when you see what this thing will do. If, that is, you wake up in time and get to grips with what it means. And part of that, according to Bob, will mean that you’re going to have to get savvy with Social Application Servers like Ringside’s.