Last weeks session titled The Next Digital Experience at the World Economic Forum in Davos is recommended viewing. The panel was chaired by Michael Arrington from TechCrunch and made up of Hamid Akhavan from T-Mobile, Eric K. Clemons from Wharton, Chad Hurley from YouTube, Craig Mundie from Microsoft, Shantanu Narayen from Adobe and Mark Zuckerberg from Facebook. Discussions cover how mobility, social networks, privacy and platforms are co-evolving in a Meta Age. Runtime is just over one hour.

On the non-profit side we have spoken with representatives from charities about how they might better harness the power of the Web. One of those is Paul Lynch and his committee who organise the annual GOAL charity ball in Paris. This year they are using a wiki to organise the event rather than email. Ronan and Paul have revamped www.goal-ball.org enabling people to pay for tickets online, specify meal choices and pick tables. A group has also been setup on Facebook (GOAL Ball Paris) for attendees to join in the conversation.

Each of the above projects are good illustrations of the transition now taking place in social computing. The beneficial use of second generation Web tools is now moving from early adopters to mainstream users.

Debra Aho Williamson shared Comscore KPI data for each of above looking at unique visitors worldwide, US social network advertising spend and time spent on site. The growth and importance of social network platforms continues apace. With proof-of-concepts now firmly in place all eyes are on next generation platforms soon to come to market.

Some of the hybrids we are tracking from the social network and virtual worlds space show promising early signs. As development continues apace within this space each of these next generation platforms will take digital identity and attention streams to a whole new level. All of which will provide the foundations necessary for the Meta Age to become a reality.

The consulting unit of faberNovel has shared one of its social network research papers. The first part of the paper outlines some broad principles for understanding social networking websites, the second part of the paper provides case studies about online matchmaking websites Meetic and Match.com and the third part of the paper provides cases studies on business network websites Xing and LinkedIn.

Good to see faberNovel incorporate and build upon Fred Cavazza‘s excellent work on digital identity mapping. With Le Web 3 being held in Paris later this month it is timely and sure to provide a useful conversation starter at the event. A full copy of the research paper is available here for download.