Content Management Matters ™

News moves so fast on the social media field, everyone needs a hand keeping up. Except for us of course, because we are like so on the ball. Yeah...ahem...right.

On that note here are the top social media stories from the past few days, distilled into a minute's worth of scanning.

San Francisco based micro-blogging site Twitter has managed to secure US $15 million dollars in VC funding as reported by tech blog GigaOm, leaving them with a valuation of US $80 million dollars. This comes at an interesting time for the site, which has spent the past few days in a constant struggle to stay up and running.

Just curious, but do you think even though they are competitors, the top guns at MySpace, Facebook and Google spend all their time on Gmail chatting about when and how they’ll release the news of their latest endeavors to move towards data portability?

Or maybe they have spies in each other’s camps sending smoke signals home at night spilling the beans of latest plans to take over your data profile? Flashbacks to Pinky and Brain cartoons spill over into my daytime routine.

In either case, it’s been a busy couple of weeks with Facebook announcing Facebook Connect, then last night Google previewed Friend Connect. Now we read all about MySpace’s “Data Availability” initiative – not to be confused with Data Portability – which allows MySpace members to share their public profile with websites of their choice.

Is this the year of the “User Identity Battle”?

After having discussed the basics of microblogging, we here at CMSWire decided it would be a good idea to cover some general practices that will enhance your microblogging experience, increase your results, and create more enjoyment for you.

Not only will these practices aid you in your quest for followers and friends, they will help make your microblog into a marketing tool that is usable in a variety of ways.

Blogging has been around for some time now, but there is a new aspect of blogging that is on the rise across the web. That aspect is microblogging. Much like the advent of text messaging, microblogging is taking the idea of being connected to the next level and sweeping the world over.

Do you spend the better part of your days twittering with your friends? Are you hooked on Twitter but find it frustrating that you can’t share photos, videos and files with your friends? Good news for you…

At Le Web 3 conference in Paris this morning, we were tuned into Evan Williams, the founder of Twitter. The topic of his mini keynote was Persistent Communication, but he really didn't say much about that actually. And I must say I wasn't too disappointed -- I happen to think we're all twittering a bit too much these days, and I don't much care what you had for breakfast, nor if you're stuck in traffic on 101 Northbound. Sorry!

What was interesting about Evan's talk was his focus on simplicity, a concept increasingly noodled upon these days, and one close to our hearts.

Amazon has just published a white paper about its latest project Dynamo, which focuses on distributed storage.

Dynamo isn't an operating system; rather, it works on a series of hundreds of commodity PCs running Linux, all hooked up to an internal network. And while the company has no plans to sell the service to the public, Dynamo plays an integral role in a number of Amazon's existing offerings, including its shopping cart, product catalog and S3 -- Amazon's online web app storage solution.

Everybody was keyed-up, waiting for Blaine Cook of Twitter to talk, and he finally did. It wasn't quite what we expected (well, what were we expecting?), but it was nonetheless educational and really sort of surprising.

Cook took advantage of a long list of Twitter's mistakes and weaknesses to introduce us to Starling, his response to platforms based on Erlang and other technologies -- which he asserts would have been a general nightmare.

For people who have friends they'd love keeping in touch with but can't actually be bothered to pick up the phone, and people who'd love to be worldly but aren't always inclined to check a slew of news sites catering to their interests, the answer is like so Obvious.

Or brought to you by Obvious, anyway: enter Twitter, a messaging platform that keeps users informed and in touch and all with a minimum of those precious mouse clicks.