Artesia Spotlight: May 4th, 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.

Report Spotlight

Forrester's new report "The Future of the Social Web" defines the "five eras" of the social web, which will eventually result in "communities defining future products and services". According to the report, the eras of the Social Web are overlapping, and we've already reached the maturity phase of the first era, the era of social relationships. The report suggests that brands should start preparing for the upcoming eras of the social web today, and be ready to make some changes in the ways they distribute their content online and interact with their customers. For more details on the Five Eras of the Social Web, see this blog summary by the Forrester researcher Jeremiah Owyang.

Post Spotlight

The post "Should Your Company Have a Social Media Policy?" on the Mashable blog tries to answer the basic questions related to the implementation of a social media policy within your company. Your customers are probably already talking about your company using social media, so companies will have to internally decide about how to manage this new form of communication.

Other news

• CheckFacebook is a new website that helps you monitor Facebook growth around the world.
• Facebook has announced support for OpenID.
• IBM has launched My developerWorks, a social network for the 8 million members of developerWorks, the largest online technical resource center for software developers.
• BuddyPress, a suite of WordPress plugins and themes that adds social networking features to WordPress installations, has officially launched.