Although it’s only Wednesday, this week has already seen several exciting developments in the world of social media. The Web is evolving into a place we can share information instantaneously, just as we do face-to-face in the offline world.
We’ll start with a rumor, which came from the Boy Genius Report blog and cited widely in outlets like TechCrunch and BusinessWeek, that iTunes 9 will reflect a new social media strategy for Apple. The company has stayed largely away from integrating social tools into their products and services until now. Although details are thin, the new version of Apple’s music service is said to include the ability for users to broadcast songs to their friends on social networks. Since consumers are already figuring out ways to share their music online through hosting services like RapidShare and personalized radio stations like Blip.fm, it makes sense for Apple to get into the game and make it an easier process for their customers. We’ll withhold any judgments until the company announces hard news.
The FriendFeed acquisition by Facebook is also timely and interesting. FriendFeed is a real-time feed aggregator that pulls together a user’s RSS feeds, as well as the status updates and other information they post anywhere on the Web. Without speculating too much about Facebook’s strategy around the acquisition, what we feel it points to is the market coalescing around social applications and real-time communication (or the “instant Web”). We’ve posted about this before (here and here) and feel the time is ripe for online businesses to begin integrating this type of functionality on their sites. A number of brands already have real-time social shopping, and you can follow our blog and news pages for additional updates on this front. With these recent pieces of real-time news, it looks more like the instant Web is the next stage of online communication.
…and this just in: DecisionStep customer Charlotte Russe and our ShopTogether application were featured today in The San Diego Union-Tribune in a story about how companies are utilizing social networking to reach customers. Story here.
Tags: apple, facebook, friendfeed, instant web, real-time, ShopTogether, social shopping