Artesia Spotlight: December 22nd, 2008

Artesia Spotlight is a bi-weekly review of key news in the fields of social media, user communities and virtual worlds. If you want to be the first to read the news, you can subscribe to receive Artesia Spotlight by e-mail on this page.

Best of 2008 Spotlight

Popular web technology news blog ReadWriteWeb has published several Best Products 2008 lists that highlight the best online applications of the past year. Our favorite lists in the series are:

• Top 10 Enterprise Web Products of 2008
• Top 10 Consumer Web Apps of 2008
• Top 10 Real World Web Apps of 2008
• Top 10 Mobile Web Products of 2008

2009 predictions Spotlight

The end of the year is also a popular time to make predictions about what the new year will bring us. Peter Kim, a former Forrester analyst, has compiled a comprehensive list of Social media predictions 2009, as seen from the point of view of 14 top social marketing professionals. Also, Pew Internet has published the report The Future of the Internet III, in which they present how experts see the future of technology and its role in the year 2020.

Other news

• In the last issue we spotlighted Google Friend Connect and Facebook Connect, two competing technologies that allow users to sign in to supported sites with their existing accounts. Now, MySpace has relaunched their previously announced Data Availability product under the name MySpaceID, which will allow user to log in third-party sites with their MySpace account. Unlike Facebook Connect, MySpaceID supports open standards and works with Google Friend Connect.
• Facebook now has over 140 million active users worldwide and a growth rate of 600 000 users each day. If you're interested in more demographic statistics, check out this interactive online tool.
• Sony has finally released the first open beta version of Home, the virtual world for Playstation 3 users.