Bebo Puts Oracle(R) At The Heart of Social Networking
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SAN FRANCISCO, Jan. 31  /PRNewswire/ -- Social networking website bebo.com is one of the largest and most successful drivers in the evolution of "Web 2.0" services, the second generation of Internet-based services that emphasize online collaboration and sharing among users.
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Scores of vendors are now in the &quot;white-label&quot; social networking platform business, according to a running tally by a Forrester Research analyst.Instead of a proprietary platform like LinkedIn or Facebook,&#160;such companies offer a framework to enterprises or individuals wishing to build an online community tailored to their tastes and needs. The platforms are being used for everything from marketing and branding to internal enterprise use.It&#39;s hard not to let out a low whistle when you scan this post at analyst Jeremiah Owyang&#39;s blog.&quot;Yup, I&#39;m the analyst focused on this space, and not even I can keep up with the many vendors,&quot; Owyang said via e-mail.&quot;The flood in this market is due to low barriers to entry from easy-to-deploy software, an influx of venture money wanting to get in on the &#39;so-net&#39; action and media frenzy from existing social networks like Facebook, MySpace and others,&quot; he said.This particular bubble could soon contract, Owyang suggested. &quot;Like the [content management system] industry in the late &#39;90s, expect to see some major acquisitions from major [enterprise resource planning], media, and Web companies ... traditional CMS vendors are currently adding &#39;social features&#39; to their products -- most without success -- and will resort to acquiring vendors to fill their suites.&quot;Surviving companies will become marketing partners for enterprises, not just software providers, he predicted. &quot;Let&#39;s not discount technology completely, it can be an edge, but the ones that will stand out will have a full solution,&quot; he said.Alex Blum, CEO of KickApps, said Owyang has a point.A successful social-networking site &quot;has very little to do with technology,&quot; he said, and &quot;more to do with how you program and nurture a successful community.&quot;The company wrote a white paper, &quot;Nine Steps to a Successful Online Community,&quot; that spends only a limited amount of time talking about technology.Like other companies, KickApps&#39; hosted platform is set up to let customers handle customizations. &quot;We need to have a scalable business on a self-service basis,&quot; Blum said. &quot;If we relied on going out and talking to every one of our customers, it wouldn&#39;t work. It doesn&#39;t scale.&quot;However, KickApps offers tools that run the gamut from a simple-to-use editor for adjusting look and feel, to more robust developer APIs. The company claims that about 14,000 sites have been built with its platform.In contrast to the relatively new KickApps, which started up in 2005, Sparta Social Networks is a veteran in the space, having formed in 1999.That seasoning will help the company as the category contracts, said its CEO, Jerry Sheer. &quot;We&#39;ve got eight years behind us. We understand the space more than these new players.&quot;The company is also banking on its J2EE-based platform, which is ideal for large enterprises, Sheer said.Sparta will apply advanced analytics and metrics to derive meaning from social networking data. &quot;We&#39;re going to do some very interesting things,&quot; Sheer said, adding that a social network is essentially a &quot;focus group on steroids.&quot;That strategy ties into a trend Owyang sees: companies offering &quot;insight, intelligence and data&quot; about online communities. There&#39;s yet another related category as well, the analyst notes: firms pushing Web collaboration offerings.From the wide range of choices, G-Unit Records picked Ning, a company formed by Netscape cofounder Marc Andreessen. Ning targets both consumers and businesses with its hosted offering.Chris &quot;Broadway&quot; Romero, who oversees digital media at G-Unit Records, said Ning was the right platform for rap star 50 Cent&#39;s social networking site, citing its ability to &quot;stand in the background.&quot;&quot;Unless you&#39;re an administrator, you don&#39;t have to see their name too much,&quot; he said.Romero said Ning &quot;could run a little faster,&quot; but mused, &quot;Every time you add someone with the power of 50 Cent, it&#39;s going to bend the walls of any system out there.&quot;Seventy-five thousand people are members of the site, according to Romero. That growth was driven by person-to-person referrals, not traditional advertising, he said. &quot;It&#39;s definitely the way of the future,&quot; he said of social networking as a marketing tool. &quot;Everyone should do it.&quot;It may not matter much if enterprises find themselves with fewer offerings to choose from down the road, he suggested: &quot;It&#39;s more about the person&#39;s vision than the tools, most of the time.&quot;
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IBM released Atlas, a software toolset that provides advanced search and analysis functions for its enterprise social networking product, Lotus Connections, on Tuesday.&quot;Atlas looks at the data within Connections and does some visualizations of the information,&quot; said Chris Lamb, senior product manager. &quot;The main point is that it is a way to visualize the social data from a line-of-business perspective and a personal level.&quot;The Atlas suite contains four components dubbed My Net, Find, Reach, and Net.The Net component provides a view of groups that have formed within an organization due to work on similar projects, IBM said. The point is to help users find ways to improve communications among various nodes throughout the company. My Net provides a similar view but focuses on a user&#39;s personal network.Atlas also includes Reach, a dashboard-like tool that helps users &quot;navigate the six degrees of separation that divide them from a colleague,&quot; as an IBM statement describes. The purpose is to help workers more quickly connect with people in the organization who have a particular skill set or area of knowledge.The last component is Find, which can provide search results that leverage social networking-related data, such as blogs and reporting structures, according to IBM.Atlas and Lotus Connections fit into an ambitious push by IBM around social collaboration in enterprises.A growing number of people use multiple networks and would like to easily move their profile data between them. Without providing specifics, Lamb said IBM is moving to address the problem.&quot;That&#39;s something that we&#39;re looking at, how we aggregate that,&quot; he said. &quot;There will be some announcements around the Lotusphere time frame.&quot; Lotusphere is scheduled for Jan. 20-24 in Orlando, Florida.IBM is selling Atlas through its Software Services for Lotus group. Lamb declined to provide specific pricing information.
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Need a contact to score a big deal? Social-networking firms say their software can find a corporate friend
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Last week Democratic presidential hopeful Barak Obama launched his own social network, MyBarakObama.  Thereâs been a lot of discussion as to who made this and how well it works. Iâm not really concerned with either. What Iâm wondering is: Why was this made? MyBarakObama offers features already available on free sites like MeetUp, MySpace and Facebook [...]
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Social-networking sites like the big three -- MySpace, Facebook and LinkedIn -- act as a sort of shared address book, letting people post profiles, leave notes for one another and find out whom they know in common.
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These aren't your teenager's social networking sites.
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When prominent blogger Robert Scoble tried to collect contact data about his friends stored in Facebook, the social networking site reprimanded him. But Plaxo, the creators of the new address book importer Scoble was beta testing, have no plans to discontinue development of the tool. Let the data portability standoff begin.
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Cisco Systems, the biggest vendor in IP (Internet Protocol) networking, is diversifying into social networking.
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Search reality check From BEA Systems and its soon-to-be owner Oracle, from mighty IBM to a myriad of social network and online office start-ups, vendors have been telling us how the "Google generation" and Web 2.0 will change the way we work. Many have been flogging applications and middleware products, strategies and marketing puff to back this up.â¦
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In a new post to her Oracle blog today, Alison Holloway shares the presentation she gave at this year's Melbourne Opensource Developers' Conference titled "Working with PHP and Oracle".   I don't think the organizers are going to post the presentations, so I wanted to make it available here.   The talk covers things like the free Oracle tools available, the OCI8 extension, connection management, improving performance, and some Oracle resources. You can grab the PDF download here.
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Comment is free: Indra Adnan: Social networking has turned relationships that were easy to distinguish into one amorphous web.
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Paul Jones has posted a teaser concerning his talks(s) at the upcoming php|works conference this year. One is about organizing your applications to make them easier to maintain and work better and the other is a follow up to some previous benchmarks he created comparing several of the popular PHP frameworks.   About The Benchmarking Talk - Easy one-liner: "Statistical Histories for Fun and Profit." And I do mean profit: the better your apps runs on a given stack, the more eyeballs you get on your ads (or, the more users you can handle).   He will be talking about why benchmarking your app is important, how to benchmark a framework and, the thing everyone's waiting for - his benchmark stats comparing several popular frameworks.   Paul also requests that, if possible, one developer from the teams of each of the other frameworks (besides Solar of course) could be in attendance to critique the talk and help point out issues either with the talk or in his methods.
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Fingers all tired from typing Web addresses from Bebo to Zebo to hit all your social networking and media sharing sites?
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Blog: A first look at Searchles: a new web app that seeks to combine social networking with web search functionalities.
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Social networking sites are called 'better than print' for recruiting IT staff.
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Facebook has become such a popular social networking site that some companies are betting their businesses on it.Participants in a panel at the Web 2.0 Summit conference in San Francisco Thursday cited the impact of Facebook."We looked at the Facebook platform before it launched and came away with the conclusion that this could be the greatest paradigm shift in technology since the Internet itself," said panelist Ali Partovi, CEO of the iLike music discovery service.iLike bet close to 100 percent of its business on Facebook, he said."We made a very big bet. We basically decided to halt work on our own Web site and spent the next [several] weeks that we had building a Facebook application," Partovi said. iLike's own Web site, meanwhile, is used to drive traffic to the Facebook application, he said."Literally, within the first 24 hours, our Facebook registrations exceeded the rest of our Web site," by a dramatic amount, he said. In the first 12 hours, iLike signed up 10,000 users, followed by 10,000 more in the next three hours and 10,000 more in the next two hours, he said.Facebook application developer Slide is probably allocating 35 percent of its efforts to the site, said Slide Vice President Keith Rabois. Slide decided to invest in Facebook because it created an open environment that encouraged developers to make money for the first time."That has been a sea change," Rabois said.Facebook opened the floodgates for a raft of innovations, said Seth Goldstein, CEO and co-founder of SocialMedia, which also has developed applications for Facebook. Facebook has 2 million users, half of whom use it daily, he said."There's a level of engagement," inside the Facebook platform, he said.Another panelist noted Facebook widgets. "The neat thing about the Facebook platform is you can actually talk to friends through widgets, thorough the APIs," said Lance Tokuda, CEO of the RockYou photo-sharing site.