Artesia Spotlight: September 2009

Artesia Spotlight is a monthly 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.

Research Spotlight

Forrester Research has published the newest Social Technographics Profile data, which classifies customers into six levels of participation in social technologies. Forrester's research has shown that over half of online Americans are joining social networking sites and nearly 75% are consuming social content at least once a month. Interestingly enough, the number of consumers creating and collecting social content grew slowly, while the number of critics didn't grow at all. Overall, social technology has seen a large increase in 2009, mainly due to the popularity of social networking sites. However, it is also worth noting that Europe (on average) is still lagging behind the American market, which means there is still a lot of room for improvement and growth in the field of social technologies.

Report Spotlight

Analyst firm Gartner has released this year's Gartner’s Hype Cycle Special Report, which examines the maturity of technologies and trends across different industries. Gartner sees Web 2.0, cloud computing, Internet TV, virtual worlds and service-oriented architecture (SOA) among the potentially transformational technologies that will become mainstream in less than five years.

Video Spotlight

The video Social Media Revolution highlights some of the most interesting statistics related to social technologies, which show how these technologies are transforming the way we interact with one another and also the way we do business.

Other news

• Facebook has acquired online sharing service FriendFeed.
• Business social networking site LinkedIn now has over 45 million users.
• Google has launched social gadgets for iGoogle (its personalized Google page). Social gadgets allow users to share and collaborate on content and even play games with their friends.
• According to a new report published by the European Commission, almost half of Europeans use the internet every day, with those aged 16 to 24 high above the average. Unsurprisingly, low internet usage numbers are mainly seen among the low-income families, the unemployed, the elderly and among citizens with low levels of education.