The Economist on social networking - world of connections This week,  The Economist, every Capatilist’s favourite magazine, has published a special report on on social networking . A World of Connections , provides an excellent overview of the current state of social media for those still trying to get to grips with it. What joy. You can download a free pdf of the report here .

Ross Mayfield put forth a pretty interesting question on Twitter (see below). Due to the nature of email infrastructure and network routing topologies, as long as you know the email address of someone, you can send them a message (in general). Twitter It's a great question - my thoughts below: Enterprise Instant Messaging (IM)

In List Building Using Twitter , I discussed the importance of list building and the ease of building a list using Twitter . In this article I focus on building your Twitter community — people who relate to your niche and who share some of your interests — people with whom you can network and who also extend your list in a more targeted way than previously outlined. Is Twitter Past Its Prime? Twitter will not last forever. However, I’m hoping that Twitter will have a strong future.

While you are reading the presentation outline below I’d like you to think about the Twitter change today. Today Twitter turned off “see replies to those I’m not following”. Twitter are planning changing it - you won’t see my tweet at all. Therefore if I’m having a conversation with @garyphayes , and you follow me but not him, you used to see my conversation, even though it’s “one sided” for you. This has sever impact for Twitters “ripple-ability”.

New from HP's Social Computing Lab comes news of Friendlee, an entirely new kind of social network that focuses on the intimate connections between close friends, family, and colleagues. The application, designed to operate on your mobile phone, tracks your call and messaging history to provide an ambient awareness of who your "real" friends are and then adds those people to your social network. Not only that, but Friendlee also tracks the businesses you call frequently to identify your preferred services which can then be used as recommendations to your network of friends.

As organizations explore the use of social networking, the enterprise is no longer the only participant in managing identity. An employee’s social network site profile, social graph, and use of other social tools and applications enable them to construct additional identity facets to suit their own needs. As a result, organizations should incorporate “social identity” claims within identity management practices. The analysis below is an update to my earlier post . This outline forms the baseline of a discussion Alice Wang (Director, Burton Group)

The rapid growth of Facebook and Twitter has created lots of excitement. Facebook , MySpace , Twitter , LinkedIn and Ning are ranked 4th, 11th, 25th, 89th and 154th among all websites in the world, respectively. Facebook , Twitter , LinkedIn , and the Ning family of social networking sites are the most popular social networks with wide business appeal. Alexa ranks the world’s most popular websites. From a business point of view, MySpace has become primarily a niche site for the music industry.

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In December 2008, global consumers spent an average of just over three hours on social networks . According to The Nielsen Company , social network sites have grown in importance globally in 2009. Australia, Brazil, Japan, Switzerland, Germany, France, Spain and Italy) shows not only that overall time on site has increased, but also that the global audience for social networking has increased. Image by Balakov via Flickr In December 2009, they were spending over five and a half hours on average.

Three-quarters of Japanese social network users access the sites only from their mobile phones. This observation comes from a survey conducted last year with almost 4,000 social network users in Japan by Mobile Marketing Data Labo . of respondents only accessed social networking sites from their mobile phone (and not from their PC). Image via Wikipedia They found that 75.4%