Through many engagements, we hear many questions surrounding social networking: what it means; how it applies to business; and, more directly, how social networking can turn a profit for a business.

If you’re in interactive marketing today, it would be logical to assume that based on the tremendous growth in usage of Social Networking tools, you can ride the wave of interest to reach more people within a trusted network and get your message across within established groups.
Not so fast!
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Real time search is becoming all the rage, displacing some of the hype around semantic search and catapulting services like Twitter, FriendFeed and now Facebook into new realms when it comes to accessing its content. Today, search veteran Jerry Campbell is helping to launch Collecta, a service he’s claiming to be a true real time search engine unlike anything the world has seen.

As one of the minds behind the patented process that powered Summize, the Twitter search engine that was acquired by the microblogging platform and is now Twitter search, Campbell has long-standing ideas on how search and discovery should operate on the web. He’s seen the evolution of data-sharing as it pertains to things like news within he financial industry and has learned from organizations’ necessity to reach that “aha” moment as quickly as possible. It’s that “aha” moment Collecta is trying to give you, for any topic, in a very short amount of time.
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MixedInk launched early this year as a collaborative writing tool with a democratic editorial process towards finished documents. It’s platform, which promotes various voting tools, document-creation options and recommendation features, is now being used by Congress for the writing of a health care policy.

Congressman Anthony Weiner is helping to head the new project, asking citizens to help draft important health care principles that will be included in the upcoming bill. Click here for more details on Congressman Weiner’s new project.
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Meebo has made some major upgrades to one of its product services, the Meebo Bar. As a turnkey solution for integrating chat into a site where those site users can interact directly with each other, the Meebo bar enabled a community feel within any integrated destination site. The upgrade to this aspect of Meebo is the ability to pull all your chat buddies into your buddy list, regardless of which partner site you’re using to access Meebo. In short, any partner site with Meebo chat integration now supports all your chat buddies across the supported chat clients. As you may well know, these supported chat clients include AOL, Yahoo, Gchat, Facebook, and more.

The purpose of this particular upgrade is actually twofold; it not only brings a more comprehensive chat option to end users for seamless access to all their buddies, but it provides an easier and more direct way of sharing web content. To that end, another upgrade to Meebo is the sharing option, which allows users to share content from their current web page across chat, email, Facebook and Twitter. What we’re looking at here is a combining of direct media-sharing via chat with social web redistribution of content.
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Multiply, the social network for families, has completely relaunched its website this week. And at the center of the relaunch is a new take on the news feed, which was already a key component in Multiply’s feature set.

Reformatted to function much like your desktop email client (i.e. Outlook), the news feed is your central point of information-sharing within your Multiply network. There are folders on the left-hand side, which act as filters for the type of information displayed in your news feed. Custom filters are also a new option for your Multiply news feed, in order to ensure you’re receiving the content you want to see.
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Twitter can give some pretty decent feedback on a number of things, including how a certain group of people feel about a given topic or event. More recently we’ve seen the real-time update industry battling it out for attention given during specific events like President Obama’s inauguration, with Facebook and Twitter pining for more user activity. So it’s no small wonder to see that marketing agencies are looking to Twitter as a bell weather for public opinion.

The 24 hours surrounding the Oscar’s Academy Awards ceremony gave NMS ample opportunity to see what Twitter users think about the event itself, as well as various films, actors and actresses. A blog entry from NMS today outlines what it saw as the most popular Oscar-related topics on Twitter last night–Slumdog Millionaire and Sean Penn. NMS attributes the activity to the number of nominations Slumdog Millionaire received, and the political nature of Sean Penn’s acceptance speech.
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Twitter has recently added a new suggest feature that helps get you started with your new Twitter account as soon as you register. After choosing your username and password, you’ll be able to import contacts from your email accounts. Nothing new there. But the new Step 3 of the Twitter registration process now recommends several high profile Twitter accounts that cover the gamut of social media topics and personalities, from CNN to mommy bloggers, tech publications to fashionistas.

There are several apparent benefits to Twitter’s new recommendation system, for both Twitter and end users. For Twitter, the added feature makes it easier for newcomers to get started on Twitter’s service, and gives them a good idea of the type of content to be found on Twitter. For new users, there’s an immediate reward for signing up on Twitter, and it’s one that isn’t solely reliant on connecting with existing friends. For power Twitter users, their power just got greater.
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The Library of Congress is doing a great deal to raise awareness for itself as an institution, and that includes an ongoing technology push that carries over into the online realm. The latest exhibition at the Library of Congress is called With Malice Toward None: The Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Exhibition, and it opens to the public on Feb. 12.

The purpose of this exhibition is to offer additional insight into the 16th president, culminating several events that are taking place this year, from Lincoln’s 200th birthday to the observation of President’s Day, to Obama’s presidency, which Obama himself has used on several instances to honor his fellow citizen of Illinois.
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Can widgets change the face of online advertising? It’s a question that we’ve been asking ourselves since widgets became mainstream, but we still don’t have a clear answer. We have, however, seen the evolution of widgets as they’ve become major interactive conduits for disseminating information. Thanks to platforms like Facebook’s opening up for development purposes, widgets have taken on a new occupation and place in the Internet’s timeline.

Below is an interview with iWidget’s CEO Peter Yared, who speaks on iWidget and the company’s hopes for changing the face of the widget and advertising space. As iWidget, which recently raised $4 million and has upgraded its Social Syndication Platform, the company is now better able to provide deep integration with existing social media, taking content to the place where it’s most likely to be seen.
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Thummit, the real-time Twitter event tracker, has set up a dedicated page to follow tomorrow’s inauguration. Seeing as Twitter has proven to be a good way to share information about a given event, as well as offer the world real-time updates pertaining to a particular event, the concept behind Thummit’s tracking service seems to make a lot of sense.

Tomorrow will be one of the biggest events of 2009, so it’s no wonder Thummit is looking to get a little buzz going. You see, Thummit is currently in private beta, but the company is taking full advantage of the inauguration to show off what its tracking service can do.
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