Collaboration 2.0 and Enterprise Social Networking

Rumors earlier this week of Twitter negotiating a new round of funding at a valuation of $1 billion are confirmed today by co-founder Evan Williams on the Twitter Blog.

Taweet (beta) is a unique Twitter application that adds a whole new dimension to your Twitter experience: the future. The casual format of Taweet allows users to answer one simple question: "What are you doing in the future?" …and search the future to see what others are doing.

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Some promising news from the MySpace camp comes with the pending acquisition of the number one music application on Facebook, iLike. The deal is set to close around $20 million and puts Facebook in an uncomfortable position, with it's number one social media competitor owning one of the top applications on the Facebook platform.

Does social computing really deliver significantly better business performance? Or is it merely a minor incremental improvement? While many cases have shown successful implementations of collaborative social media style applications in the workplace, the benefit of Enterprise 2.0 is still a hotly debated topic.

Socialcast this Wednesday released an official developer API. After weeks of beta testing with select clients the API is now available for all Socialcast members. Socialcast is a real-time collaboration platform that allows companies to communicate and collaborate via activity streams where coworkers share text, files, images and links.

The top story on the social Web this week is Facebook's acquisition of social media aggregator FriendFeed. The transaction is reported around $50 million. FriendFeed's traffic is an estimated 1 million visitors per month which is minute compared to Facebook's 250 million. With a recent Facebook valuation of $10 billion though, the numbers...

If you are having trouble accessing Twitter today the service is apparently under heavy denial-of-service (DoS) attacks since around 9am EST. Twitter co-founder Biz Stone states, "We are defending against this attack now and will continue to update our status blog as we continue to ... investigate."

New research shows that Twitter is gaining recognition as a useful business resource among younger demographics. Twitter has become popular for young professionals as a way to find answers from experts, poll their followers, share opinions, and communicate during conferences and while traveling.

By the powers vested in me by the blogosphere I hereby declare this MySpace Charity Week! I urge everyone (who still has an active MySpace account) to login for a few minutes and post a bulletin, a few recent pictures or say hello to a friend you haven't spoken to in a while. The "Forgot your password?" link may come in handy.

The U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) is considering blocking all access to social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter and MySpace. The concern is that these platforms "make it way too easy for people with bad intentions to push malicious code to unsuspecting users," says a U.S. Strategic Command (Stratcom) source.

Twitter rolls out a stylish new homepage this week and is finally promoting real-time search front and center. Up until now, when talking with friends about the true power of Twitter lying in it's real-time search capabilities, some seemed to not fully grasp the concept. Hopefully the new design will help more users understand how it works.

A little buzz has been stirring this past week originating from a post on consultant Cheryl Smith's blog describing how her husband [Peter Smith] received a dating advertisement through Facebook displaying her photo along with the text, "Hey Peter, Hot singles are waiting for you!"

Collaber on Web comes to market today as an extension of the Collaber Desktop real-time collaboration software suite. Collaber allows teams to share files, folders, tasks, events and track project activities through a unified workspace.

Zoomerang this week delivers increased sharing and collaboration for businesses seeking efficient and effective solutions for managing online surveys. The centralized architecture allows disconnected employees and teams to come together and share survey results and templates to increase productivity.

For the first time we see a major brand promoting a Twitter based service on network television commercials. Corporate websites taking a backseat to social media is a trending topic this year. Not too long ago we talked about Volkswagen promoting their Facebook fan page on their commercials.

http://www.manageit.me ---The greatest minds in IT in 50+ presentations : top industry-leaders: Creator of MySQL Michael "Monty" Widenius, Internet Celebrity Gary Vaynerchuk, Co-Creator of PHP & Zend CTO Zeev Suraski, Richard Sheridan, CEO of Menlo Innovations & Pioneer of Agile eXtreme Programmi...

The top story from the Googleplex this week is the announcement confirming Google Wave will be available to 100,000 testers this fall. The latest project lead by Google Maps developers Lars and Jens Rasmussen, Google Wave is an open source collaboration and communications platform that fuses conversations and documents in real-time.