Weekly Digest of the Social Networking Space: Jan 15, 2009

I’m respecting your limited time by publishing this weekly digest on the Social Networking space, which I cover as an industry analyst. By creating this digest (I started this over a year ago) it really helps me to stay on top of the space I cover.

I’ve created a new category called Digest (view archives). Start with the Web Strategy Summary, then quickly scan the succinct and categorized headlines, read text for my take, and click link to dive in for more.

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Web Strategy Summary
Usage of social media will continue to rise, the growth of China’s internet population bodes to growth off shores. Forrester has launched a Wave report over community platforms. “Diso” a technology that suggests social will be aggregated to one page will occur, and several make predictions for the upcoming year.

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Usage: Surge in Chinese internet users.
Although the Chinese internet population is greater than the entire US citizenship, a sharp increase in usage is reported, primarily from mobile.

Research: Forrester “Waves” Community Platforms
I lead this research, where we’ve segmented the leaders in the community platform space. I know some folks are subscribed to this digest and not my blog, so excuse me if you’ve already heard.

Deals: Neighborhood American showcases wins
Community platform Neighborhood America showcases several client wins including Kodak, City of New Orleans, and Wharton Business school in their latest newsletter, you can subscribe on the website.

Tech: Future of Social Dashboards, Diso
Marc Canter has frequently been the guiding light for open data and suggests that the future dashboard of all things could be a technology called Diso, RWW has more info.

Data: Will Facebook US members overtake MySpace
Techncrunch highlights recent Comscore data and suggests that Facebook’s US members 54mm members will overtake MySpace in 2010, 76mm, one year from now.

Future: 8 Predictions for Enterprise 2.0
Dion writes like an analyst and breaks down his predictions for 2009 revolving around social computing within the enterprise. He highlights that community will be one of the priorities within the enterprise.

Predictions: Hivelive suggests what’s upcoming for communities
Hivelive, a Colorado community platform boasts a very flexible component based system so don’t be surprised about their predictions for the new year. Overall, I agree, specific use cases for community are going to be needed.

Launch: Cisco puts forth a community platform “Eos”
I’ve profiled this launch (and the Cisco team has responded) read this post for details. Surprisingly, other than a few press releases and blog posts, we’ve not seen much more from this highly secretive project.

Interview: Jive’s CMO on FastCompany TV
Thought leader and executive of 4 years, Sam Lawrence the CMO of Jive Software spends time with Scoble on Fast Company TV.

Contest: Sony community needs a name
An interesting way to drive community interaction and interest, Sony encourages it’s members to help name it’s own community. This community is run by Powered, who I had a briefing with yesterday, that specializes in content and editorial, in addition to just a platform. (edit: This is actually an Awareness community, but Powered does run these Sony communities backstage101, darkroom, and frontline)

Launch: Awareness launches Sony Blog
A different division of Sony has launched a community during CES that’s run by Awareness Networks, see the Sony Electronics Blog. Just goes to show that multiple vendors are often within one brand.

Vocab: Buzzword Leaderboard
The good folks at Royal Pingdom have helped to create this index of web buzzwords and terms, what’s really interesting is they’ve rated which terms are peaking –marketers responsible for messaging should take note.

If you’re a social network, or widget company, I want to know of your news, send me an email, or leave a comment below. Help me stay up to date.

Hungry For Social Networking Stats? Then you should see my collection of Social Networks Stats for 2008 and 2009. Bookmark them, then share it with others as I continue to update it.