Weekly Digest of the Social Networking Space: July 24, 2008

I’m respecting your limited time by publishing this weekly digest on the Social Networking space, which I cover as an Industry Analyst –a good way to get in my head.

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.

You can subscribe to this digest tag only, which filters only these posts tagged digest.

Web Strategy Summary
This was a very busy week. Facebook launched a major redesign, with a commitment to developers and improving the application experience for users. LinkedIn cut a content deal with NYT, the media heats up about social networks. MySpace offers OpenID, yet advertising attemps still struggles to make money on these growth platforms.

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Facebook: Redesign, Developer Program
Perhaps the most important info of the week is the newly launched redesign, which some feel isn’t aimed at mainstream, which some suggest looks like Friendfeed, as well as developer program to improve the widget experience (tiering of applications, most trustworthy apps score the best) and Facebook Connect, which I covered in depth.

Partnership: New York Times and LinkedIn
Hot on the heels of a content deal with BusinessWeek, LinkedIn continues to extend it’s network to New York Times online readers by providing shared content, another example of the spread of social and content.

Standards: MySpace offers OpenId Support
Open ID allows anyone to have a single sign on from one site to another. Essentially, you’ll have one user name and password for any site that embraces OpenID, now including MySpace, one the largest social networks in north America.

Stats: Facebook stats by region and applications
South America has the largest growth rate and US growth is slow and steady, read this report from O’Reilly.

Research: White Label Social Network to be $1.3B in Five years
This article, focused on the white label folks makes predictions based off report from ABI Research predicts the industry will reach $1.3 billion within five years.

Hivelive to sponsor Community Design Challenge
I’ll be one of the judges for this event, the winner gets a free community platform, great marketing and for a good cause.

Fraud: Man sues for fake profile
A man sued for damages in UK against someone who created a fake profile and slandered them.

Community Theory: Build vs Join
Aaron Strout, of Mzinga provides an analysis and viewpoint of join vs build, a discussion we’ve had on this blog for some time.

Advertising: Getting less effective and therefore cheaper
Social networks still haven’t figured out how to monetize. The price of advertising with Lookery and other social network ad price plummets, “7.5 cents per thousand ad impressions (CPMs). Back in January, Lookery was offering 12.5 cents per ad impression. So that means Lookery has cut its ad rates nearly in half. ” sheesh.

White Label: Enterprises get ready
I’m always glad to see news about the white label social networking space, in this article, they indicate that they are starting to be taken serious for enterprise use.

Branded Community: MTV launches Community
Following the many brands that have already launched their own communities, MTV launches a community (two actually) aimed at youth.

Applications: Living Social
This suite of applications called living social allows people to rate, rank, and organize their belongings as a Facebook application.

EMC Delivers Version 6.5 Of Documentum ECM Suite
While it’s not super clear from this page of what they delivered: “a family of products that marries the great user experience of Web 2.0 and the strength of the enterprise-class Documentum platform to deliver a balance between business agility and IT control.” one could assume that EMC is delivering social features to the latest version of Documentum, a CMS suite (they call ECM)

Save your boss time, send them this digest, leave a comment if I missed any. If you work for any company in this space (or represent them as their PR agency) keep me updated by sending me emails. (subject line “Digest”)