Personal profiles, activity feeds and status updates are integrated effectively into many business tools.

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For example, OpenText Tempo Social is a collaboration tool, which has activity feeds, profiles and dashboards.

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The new features include activity feeds, personal profiles, status updates, discussion forums, document sharing, messaging, email, and web conferencing.

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Others nearby will see the message at the top of their activity feeds and can reply to it and engage in a kind of public group discussion.

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The ultimate goal for IBM is not only to show that this suite of applications can be more valuable through integration of news feeds created from activity streams, but to also to act as a conduit so that the rest of the applications and sources of information used in a business can have their value amplified by social networking mechanisms.

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For corporations, less consumer spending means retrenchment, layoffs and diminished capital spending, which further diminishes business activity and puts more of a drain on consumer spending...and the downward cycle feeds on itself.

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