Artesia Spotlight: October 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.

Resource Spotlight

As the popularity of social media sites continues to rise, many companies are developing a social media presence. That includes thinking about how their employees communicate through social media. For this reason, companies often decide to write their own social media policy. Chris Boudreaux, author of the upcoming book “Social Media Governance”, has compiled a database of over a hundred social media policies from various organization, which can provide a good starting point for your company's social media policy.

Tool Spotlight

Facebook and Google are both trying hard to provide easy to use social features for website owners. Recently, both companies simplified the process of adding Facebook Connect and Google Friend Connect respectively to a website. Both services allow users to interact with websites using their existing Facebook or Google credentials. Facebook introduced Facebook Connect Wizard and developer's Playground, and Google Friend Connect setup now no longer requires administrators to upload additional files.

On this year's International Translation Day both companies also announced tools that allow site visitors to translate a website into multiple languages. Facebook has introduced Translations for Facebook Connect, an application that also helped Facebook itself translate the site into 65 languages, while Google announced their website translator gadget powered by Google Translate.

Other news

• Facebook now has over 300 million users all over the world and is cash flow positive.
• Facebook has partnered with Nielsen to develop better tools for online marketers. Their first joint product, Nielsen BrandLift, will measure the effectiveness of Facebook ads.
• IBM has launched LotusLive iNotes, a web-based e-mail service for businesses, which also includes contact management and calendars. iNotes is being marketed as a less expensive and easier to manage alternative to systems like Microsoft Exchange, and is also clearly competing with Gmail and Google Apps for businesses.
• LinkedIn has launched Profile Organizer, a service which allows LinkedIn Premium users to save profiles and organize contacts into folders.
• Nokia has acquired social networking travel site Dopplr.
• Google has launched a new microsite, which features various interesting Internet stats for the United Kingdom.