ReadWriteWeb

It seems like just like summer, Bill Murray used to sing, and that's because it was. This year, for the first time, ReadWriteWeb expanded its coverage of the technologies that change our world through the Web, with new emphasis on cloud-based services to consumers and cloud technologies for businesses. Cloud services are more than just hosts for apps. They're resources that you can provision for your changing needs, and which you can scale up or down as necessary.

Certainly 2011 was dramatically different from 2010 for businesses for one critical reason: In a very short time, suddenly true scalability for every IT service appeared within their reach. A market that was almost non-existent by the end of last year, has grown past what many analysts would consider the point of adolescence, with the shakeout subsiding and brand dropouts declining. Someone should remind these cloud service folks there's a recession going on.

So what's the next step, I asked? Do people start wearing biometric tokens that send signals to devices in the neighborhood, letting you know when you're in their vicinity so they can respond by tweeting you to please buy them?

Sure, why not, comes the swift response from Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff. Last August, as regular ReadWriteWeb readers will recall, Benioff astounded his audience at the Dreamforce conference with the mind-alteringly imminent notion that Coke machines should become aware of their customers' presence, and respond through their iPhones with bargains and loyalty points. Of course, Benioff's idea at that time relied upon the customer always having his iPhone with him. This time, at the Cloudforce conference in New York this morning, Benioff one-upped his own idea with the notion that a biometric bracelet could supply interested products and devices in the wearer's immediate vicinity with a kind of identity signal.

Can sentiment analysis be as simple as installing a browser plug-in and scrolling down a screen? You bet, and you might want to check out the latest from ViralHeat. In a matter of minutes, you too can be getting in touch with your feelings, or at least the feelings of those folks that you correspond with on Twitter. The tool has been updated to analyze Facebook's fan pages, timeline, news feed and comments.

If you use tools such as Radian6 to analyze how the social Web is talking about your company, brands or products, perhaps it might be time to take a look at what you can get for free from the competition ViralHeat. Starting today, they will offer a free developer account good for up to 5,000 connections from their site here.

A study last month by the Info-Tech Research Group found little difference by organization size in how businesses use social media, and also provided lots of practical information on how enterprises should make use of social media management tools. The report looked at the tools from a variety of vendors, including Radian6, Sprout Social, Syncapse, Socialware, Cymfony, Visible Technologies and Lithium.

The iPad isn't just a hot new consumer device, it's also an increasingly popular tool for business. Every week we take a look at the latest developments in its use in the enterprise.

This week we look at a new iPad app for cardiologists, new apps from SugarCRM, Radian6 and Zoho and a few more apps that bring SharePoint to the iPad.

This morning, Salesforce.com announced its intent to acquire social media monitoring company Radian6, a market leader in the social analytics space, for $276 million. Radian6 boasts half the Fortune 100 as customers, including AAA, Dell, GE, Kodak, Molson Coors, Pepsico, and UPS. Last month Salesforce.com announced Radian6 for Salesforce, a module that enabled Salesforce.com users to monitor and engage in social media without leaving the Salesforce.com interface.

Radian6 provides social media monitoring tools that go beyond just listing mentions of a keyword in social media. It provides detailed dashboards and basic sentiment analysis to give companies a more in-depth view of  how their brand is being discussed in the social media ecosystem. According to Constellation Research principal analyst and CEO R "Ray" Wang, "Most customers utilize Radian6 for brand management and monitoring, sales and lead generation, Social CRM, customer service, competitive intelligence, trend analysis, and crisis management." Salesforce.com already had some basic social monitoring and analytics features but the Radian6 tools will greatly enhance its abilities.

But are businesses ready to handle all the social data that can be mined from the net?

SAS introduced a social media analytics program today that will compete against the major metrics players such as Radian 6 and WebTrends. The new service shows once again how blogs and social networks are deeply influencing marketing, customer support and product groups within the enterprise.

The SAS Social Media analytics service is different than many of the social technologies we look at in our coverage. It's a hosted service that SAS builds for the client. The client develops the parameters for what they want to analyze. Rules are established that then server as the framework. Results are viewed through a web page that SAS sets up for the client.

Social Media monitoring service Radian6 just announced that it now offers support for Google Buzz. Given that Google Buzz already has more than 9 million users after less than one week on the market, it only makes sense for the large social media monitoring and analytics services to offer their clients the ability to monitor and react to conversations on this new platform. Radian6 currently covers about 4.5 million Google profiles and is expanding its index rapidly.

FriendFeed, the multi-network activity aggregator co-founded by Gmail creator Paul Buchheit, announced today that it has entered the crowded field of real time search. FriendFeed was already the best way to learn what early adopter social media users were saying about any topic across blogs, Twitter, delicious and other diverse social media sites. If FriendFeed wants to step it up to the next level and challenge business-class conversation trackers, we believe there are four steps the company needs to take.

We think that would make a whole lot of sense. In fact we think that if real time search were turned into a business tool it could challenge social media monitoring services like Radian6, Scout Labs and Sysomos. Here's what we think needs to happen in order for that to become a possibility.