Today my HootSuite client was offline for a while, which was a big surprise. In general Hootsuite is a very reliable service. Fortunately, I was informed this was due to a remarkable update. Some time late I noticed significant changes to the social media dashboard beginning with a completely refreshed HTML5 user interface, plus geo-located search, native Twitter ReTweets, and integrated Google Analytics.

For me Hootsuite was already the best Social Media dashboard for both personal and team based social media management. Today’s improvements prove Hootsuite continuously keeps improving its service.

When you open your LinkedIn page to update your status, you will notice a new feature. From today LinkedIn enabled easy sharing of news and links. A nice new feature which enables you to share what’s hot in your domain. It’s easy to share the news with your network. LinkedIn is step by step becoming more social.

The adoption of social media is increasing at high speed. You only have to watch the impressive increase of Twitter and Facebook accounts. They offer both new opportunities and challenges to stand above the crowd. If you listen to all the advice there is hardly any way to escape from it. On the other hand the group of users is still rather small. Besides many accounts are hardly used and there is a big group of very passive users. Depending on your type of business this means you have to analyze carefully where you can meet your potential clients. Because there is still a big chance you have to meet them offline! The social media area might still be a geek domain.

It looks like LinkedIn is working hard to make up for the delay in their development over the past years. Soon a new redesign will be available and yesterday LinkedIn announced they will offer Twitter integration. For a long time LinkedIn has been already providing a Twitter and Facebook alike status update, but it turned out that hardly anybody is using it. Gradually the new service will become available in the upcoming days. [Updated after the functionality appeared in my profile]

If you don’t know what to do with your time register for every available social network. But for me keeping all my social network accounts up to date is taking too much time. It’s possible to use all kind of tools to link all different networks, but what’s use in it? Is that social? Couldn’t we just all together agree to use just one or two social networks? Which one would win? Please vote on our poll!

The world started with a Big Bang and now it seems that the Universe is expanding endlessly. And that’s exactly what happens with the phenomenon of social networks. In every quantifiable way, in every statistics, we can notice a massive growth of interest in social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc. However, what is the future of these networks? How long will they last? What sizes are they able to reach? Does a 3712% growth in the time spent on Twitter within one year prove that the future of social networking will be bright?

It is inevitable that Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and other online social networks will increase the size of our social groups since it’s not time-consuming to cultivate these relationships. You are able to constantly monitor your friends’ lives through photos and regular “status updates”. But how big can our social network grow before we are no longer able to logically analyze the relationships within the net”friends”? How many contacts in the network can our brain grasp and  recognize?