ReadWriteWeb

The launch of Digg's redesign will likely go down in the history of social media as a textbook example for how to alienate your users. Over the last few weeks we have chronicled the demise of the Digg community in great detail, but thanks to the latest data from Hitwise, we now have some hard facts about the current state of Digg. At its peak, Digg had over 40 million unique visitors every month. Since the launch of the redesign, Digg's traffic has been in free fall, though. Traffic from visitors in the U.S. has declined 26% since the redesign went live.

The demand for community management and other social media careers is growing fast - even at a time when the recession seems poised to double dip and more than 9% of the population is unemployed.

Social media is the one job sector in which recent college grads are having luck, reports Newsweek, and universities are adding social media classes in response.

According to a current headline on TechMeme, McDonalds saw a 33% increase in foot traffic to its stores when it ran a promotion during Foursquare Day earlier this year. At that time, the fast food chain offered users who checked into McDonald's a chance to win $5 and $10 gift cards. On the Econsultancy blog, Meghan Keane reports that McDonald's head of social media Rick Wion claims that, "with this one little effort [$1000 in gift cards], we were able to get a 33% increase in foot traffic to the stores." These numbers, however, simply don't add up.

Google and Microsoft are the #1 and #2 most social corporations, according to a new report by NetProspex, a social media sales and marketing contact database.

Tech companies dominated the list, but not exclusively. Other companies in the top 25 include Amazon.com, Best Buy, Apple, Williams-Sonoma, Gap, Electronic Arts, Pulte Homes, and Walt Disney, which has fallen to #25 from the #5 spot since the last time the report was done in May. Goldman Sachs was #50.

Users who want to advertise what they're watching and share recommendations for TV shows and movies with friends have plenty of choices. Apps and mobile sites including GetGlue, TV.com Relay, Philo, Miso, etc. all hope to siphon conversation about TV, movies and even books and music from social networks like Twitter.

But there seems to be disagreement on how to do this and why users should want to share their thoughts on an entertainment-specific platform instead or in addition to Twitter and Facebook, where friends are most likely to see them.

Gist.com is a database of dynamic, information-rich user profiles that can be accessed via the Web or inside your email or other communication-management tool, or on your mobile device.

The database is populated with the people who have signed up for Gist's public beta and their contacts. There are 100 million profiles of people and companies behind Gist's wall, collected over about a year. Now, Gist wants users to "claim" their profiles by updating their own data (and potentially making some information public).

Netherlands-based website monitoring company WatchMouse has created a public website dedicated to measuring performance at social networking sites including Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, LinkedIn, Del.icio.us, Digg, Xanga and Flickr.

WatchMouse also release uptime statistics for the top 20 social sites for the month of August. The leaders were Orkut, which had no downtime, Flickr with just four minutes of downtime, Del.icio.us with 12 minutes of downtime and the gaming site hi5 with 32 minutes of downtime.

Every day, thousands of scheduled events happen on the Internet. These range from live video and audio shows to chats, poker tournaments and sales on Woot and Groupon. The problem, though, is that there is no single place to find out about these upcoming events. Live Matrix, which just launched, wants to change this. The service aims to be a TV Guide for all scheduled events on the Internet and currently indexes about 100,000 events per week.

We are once again pleased to announce a new premium report: The Social Layer: How the Rise of Web-Oriented Architecture is Changing Enterprise IT. Thanks to Socialtext for sponsoring the report and making it available as a free download.

The Web 2.0 era gave rise to social applications such as Twitter and Facebook. These services made it easier to share information and connect with family, friends and experts. The enterprise has followed this movement by creating its own social applications that fit within a secure environment.

Polar Rose, a Swedish-based facial recognition startup launched in summer 2007, is shutting down its consumer-facing service that allowed users to tag people in photos anywhere on the Web. Last spring, the innovative company introduced facial recognition to popular photo-sharing site Flickr by way of a third-party browser plugin. With the plugin installed, Polar Rose users could tag their Flickr photos with the names of their Facebook contacts and then alert those friends on Facebook that they had been tagged. It also organized Flickr photos into pages by person and could recognize people automatically in later uploads.

Unfortunately, this and all other end user-focused services are being terminated as the company switches its focus to its series of facial recognition products. Says Polar Rose's Thijs Stalenhoef, the service was "fun while it lasted."