In the latest issue of eWeek, Matt Hicks asks two critical questions:
Are enterprises ready for social networking?
Are social networking vendors ready for the enterprise?
This is noteworthy because it's the first really in-depth look that a major publication has taken at business-focused social networking applications like Spoke, Visible Path, and Zero Degrees, which are focused on Read More...

Well, we're certainly pleased about it, if more than a little surprised! After being live just three days (for those of you new here, the older posts are our newsletter articles converted to the blog format), the Online Business Networking Blog has been named Feedster's Feed of the Day for today.
Thanks to all our Read More...

Kudos to the Seattle Times' Paul Andrews for his piece, Social networking beginning to take shape on the Web. While much of the article is just a basic run-down of the well-known social networking sites, Andrews gets three high marks from me for:

Having the guts to say, "Despite its founder's protests, though, Friendster retains Read More...

Success breeds success, and it is highly likely that so long as they keep doing what they're doing, the current A-list bloggers will continue to be at the top of the list. So, what's a new blogger to do? Technorati currently tracks about 1.5 million blogs. What's going to happen when they Read More...

The different kinds of social software have different personalities. Find the one that best matches your personality.

Many new bloggers don't realize the impact that back-end technologies like Technorati and Trackback have on the nature of blog communication. While on the service, they appear to be a one-way communication medium—just a simpler way to do web publishing—they are, in reality, a conversation.
Joi Ito points out that many people are surprised to Read More...

There's nothing like a little humor to burst an overly-hyped bubble. So check out Tech Skeptic's Fearless Forecast for 2004, in which he skewers, among other things, Friendster:
Friendster, the leader of the social networking phenomenon, becomes withdrawn, angry, defensive, moody, and erratic, leading sites one degree away from Friendster—Tribe.Net, LinkedIn, Craigslist—to stage an intervention. Read More...

In Internet Icebreakers, Inc.com's Michael Fitzgerald takes an optimistic look at business networking technologies, claiming that "the sites could fundamentally change the way people network". Never mind that I said this four months ago, I'm happy to see more mainstream coverage of this topic.
The most interesting thing in this story is that his real-world Read More...

According to Red Herring, a pack of similar companies fight for attention, while competition from the big dogs looms.
I agree... AOL, Microsoft, Yahoo, et al., will not stand idly by while the social networking startups eat away at the time users spend on the big boys' groups and communities. However, I think this trend Read More...

In light of a recent conversation on Ryze about social networking and interoperability, which all started with Sean McCullough's excellent post laying out his ideas for social networking interoperability requirements, I was pretty fascinated to read this morning about Ayala Alternative Organizational Consulting's plans for building an