Micro-blogging News & Articles

Social media moves so fast, it's hard to keep up. Here are the week's top stories in scan-friendly format:

• LinkedIn Adds To Twitter Functionality
• Social Network Use Set to Explode
• Use Twitalizer To Measure Your Influence on Twitter
• TweetDeck Updates With Google Buzz and Foursquare Integration

In a continued effort to extol the virtues of the upcoming SharePoint 2010 (news, site) platform, Microsoft created a special competition for seven startups in their BizSpark program. The competition? In one week create an Enterprise 2.0 solution on the SharePoint 2010 platform. Here are the results.

You are probably spending a good chunk of your day on Tweetdeck twittering away -- it's addictive, we know. You may also be hanging out on Yammer Desktop with your co-workers yamming it up -- that we also know well.

But Adobe AIR can be used to build much more than a micro-blogging application and SocialText (news, site) has set out to prove it. With the SocialText Desktop you can view your SocialText Signals right from your desktop. But you say SocialText Signals is just another micro-blogging solution. No, SocialText says. It's a lot more.

Here’s a silly question: Have you ever heard of Twitter? Chances are, unless you’ve been living under a rock for the last three or so years, the answer is “yes”. Or, you at least have some idea of the micro-blogging craze that is sweeping the Internet.

But did you know that the Twitter population is more diverse than America as a whole? Or that it has become a viable resource for news events and company complaints? Or that there’s been talk of charging for commercial accounts? Pew Internet & American Life Project’s most recent survey of online Americans brings us these behind-the-scenes tidbits of the Web’s most popular micro-blogging tool.

Enterprise microblogging software service provider Yammer has announced a version of their software that can be run on a company's servers, inside the corporate firewall.

The Twitter-like service intended for the workplace has had great success with the hosted version of their software and is trying to take the next step in facilitating conversations in companies and workgroups.

The decrease in RSS in favor of lifestreaming and micro-posting has, according to some, turned the Internet into a wasteland of incomplete sentences and bad acronyms. A far cry from what was once a watering hole for both the established and budding writer, today’s wordsmith may find their online writing experience saturated in services that seem to encourage the familiar saying, “less is more.”

Here to reinstate the power of creativity -- and, you know, actual writing -- is none other than Jason Shellen, the guy responsible for a little thing you may have heard about called Google Reader. His new steeze? A “content encouragement” tool called Plinky.

Zannel, the instant media network - otherwise known as Twitter with multimedia - has released an application for the iPhone called CityWatch. Now you can let people know what's happening in cities all around them, sharing your instant updates on your iPhone.

It must be interesting working over at Six Apart these days. They reported a 16 employee layoff and a management pay cut a few weeks ago. But things can’t be all that bad. They just announced the purchase of the micro-blogging platform Pownce — keeping several key people and the technology.

Take your enterprise community to new venues with Socialcast. They have released some new accessibility features to their social networking and micro-blogging platform, including access via Gmail and your iPhone.