Artesia Spotlight: January 12th, 2009

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.

News Spotlight

Microsoft has announced a tighter integration of Windows Live (their free suite of online applications) and Facebook. Users will be able to update their Facebook status through Windows Live and have their Facebook activity displayed in their Windows Live new feed. It is interesting to note that Apple will also include support for Facebook in some of the applications in the next version of iLife (their suite of multimedia software). Both announcements show that Facebook (which now has over 150 million active users) is emerging as a clear leader among online social networks and will now have the opportunity to attract even more users by becoming part of widely used and known applications and services.

Report Spotlight

The Nielsen Norman Group report on the year's ten best intranets found out that intranets have increased support for collaboration and social networking features in the past year. Also, intranets increasingly provide advanced personalization and custom news feeds that are relevant to each employee's interests and job role. For more findings and the list of the winners, see this report summary.

Tool Spotlight

Another interesting report was recently released by Forrester Research. In this report, researchers evaluated over 90 providers in the community platforms market. The top 9 vendors turned out to be: leaders Jive Software and Telligent Systems, strong performers KickApps, Pluck,  Awareness, Lithium Technologies, Mzinga and LiveWorld, and contender Leverage Software, which Forrester finds ideal for medium-size companies on a tighter budget. Forrester analyst Jeremiah Owyang also notes that choosing the community platform vendor should only be done after defining the community strategy, and also reminds companies that correctly used communities can help businesses grow and are especially important during a recession.

Other news

• Wikipedia has reached its fundraising goal for 2008. Over 125 000 donors from all over the world collected over 6.2 million USD to keep Wikipedia alive and without advertising.
• Just Leap In, a browser based 3D virtual world where users create 3D spaces and share media, is now available in public beta.