ReadWriteWeb

In May, we discussed many different ways that social media could be used for social change. One company that has been using the medium for doing social good is SocialVibe. In the past, we described this company as "an online popularity contest that turns corporate advertising into money for charity." With SocialVibe, you get to choose a brand to endorse, which earns you both brand perks and points. The points are then turned into funds for the charitable cause of your choice. The situation is somewhat of a win-win - companies get valuable social media promotion and individuals get to raise money for charity. The only question was whether or not the idea would work. Apparently, it does: SocialVibe is announcing that they've now raised more than $100,000 for charitable causes.

Social news site Mixx introduced a new feature today: Mixx Communities. Mixx always had a strong emphasis on 'groups,' but the Mixx Communities take this to a different level by offering a higher degree of customizability and a stronger emphasis on communication between group members.

There has been a recent trend of allowing groups of users to take greater control over their experiences on social news sites and Mixx's efforts add some interesting ideas to this.

Sticking with the sporting theme, and in deference to the European Championship currently in progress in Austria and Switzerland, our latest look at mainstream use of web 2.0 is a football (i.e. soccer) website. OleOle is a fully featured social media platform for football fans - and it has shown impressive growth since its launch on 28 April '08 (although it has been in public beta since last year). Already the company claims 2 million monthly unique visitors, a great stat for such a young site.

Last week we started a new series called Mainstream Web Watch, in which we'll be exploring how the Social Web is infiltrating mainstream culture. We started out with NBA.com last week, to celebrate the end of the basketball season and the crowning of a new champion (Boston Celtics). In this post we look at another mainstream basketball site, but this time a small niche site created by someone with a passion for the sport - InfiniteHoops.com.

Welcome to a new series on ReadWebWeb, which we're calling 'Mainstream Web Watch'. Over the coming weeks I will be exploring a whole range of websites for RWW - from sports sites, to grocery store sites, to government websites, to banking sites, and much more.

We're starting with a sports website that has probably peaked in popularity just this week, the NBA basketball website.

Offline, I have a network of under 50 people that I interact on a regular basis as friends. But online, the concept of "friend" is completely different. On Facebook I have nearer to 250 friends, on Twitter I have just over 300 followers. That's just a blip compared to how many friends some of the true power users on those services have, but it brings to mind the question of how many friends is too many? Surely, the answer varies person-to-person, but there have to be some universal upper limits to the concept of "friendship."

Social networking is at a major fork in the road. Down one road is adding more features to a walled garden and opening up just enough, so that users seldom need to leave. Most sites are going down this yellow brick road and the prize is clearly a big one. But they may end up back in Kansas. Down the other road, lies a future of being the primary repository for your connections (aka the social graph), but with this data available via open APIs to anybody who needs it. That is a utility type model, and as with any utility, it can be hugely valuable at scale.

Today SezWho a universal profile, content discovery, and a sophisticated reputation engine provider, has announced its acquisition of Tejit, a provider of semantic intelligence solutions. The acquisition enables SezWho to provide more precise contextual reputation scores for contributors based on topics of conversation. ReadWriteWeb gives you an in-depth look into SezWho's latest acquisition and how SezWho measures up to the competition.

Did you participate in the Twit-Out yesterday? Do you even know what that is? To get you up to speed, a handful of Twitter users, fed up with the regular outages of their favorite service, decided to band together to show Twitter some tough love by boycotting the service for a day. (Unfortunately, despite having fewer users on the service, Twitter still went down). However, in light of recent world events, it's a shame that the cause the tech community has chosen to rally around is that of Twitter's instability. Aren't there more important things going on right now?

Social media. Web 2.0. You know what these things are and you take advantage of them every day on the net. Whether you're socializing on Facebook, updating Twitter, or just adding a new bookmark to Ma.gnolia, social media has become an integral part of our daily lives. However, that doesn't mean that it's something that everyone innately understands or knows how to use - especially when it comes to using it for marketing, PR, or other business-related purposes. That's why many of today's colleges and universities are now offering "social media" classes as an option for their students.