by Michelle Lentz

My personal blog pretty much lies dormant. With so many other blogs to write for, I’m often at my wit’s end. What on earth is left to write about on this last little blog? Plinky has arrived to put an end to that.

Plinky is a microblogging service that intends to put an end to blogger writer’s block. Plinky offers a series of prompts – questions – that you can answer. So far I’ve answered the equivalent of  “What was your first job?” and “What do you wear when you get home from work?”

When you answer the question, you have the option to expand upon your thoughts and even add an introduction. After you publish to Plinky, you can still come back and edit your answer.

Like any good social network, you can follow others and people can follow you. On Plinky, interacting with others is sort of like a virtual brainstorming session, helping you to piggyback and learn from the ideas of your friends.

When you’ve written your short Plink, you can publish it to Twitter, Facebook, or your blog.

Founder Jason Shellen told VentureBeat that he started Plinky to help fight blogger’s block. “After years of blogging, it turns out I’m that person.”

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by Michelle Lentz

When I teach my class on using Twitter in Business, I always spend a fair amount of time on Twitter Search. After all, where else can you watch comments on your brand in real time?

So I really like Twingly. Previously a blog search engine, they’ve expanded to microblogging.

Twingly searches Twitter, but it also searches other microblogging sites, including Jaiku, Identi.ca, the Pownce archives, and microblogging options I haven’t even heard of.

I like being able to aggregate the information from all the sites. However, my only complaint is that the results are not real-time updates, as in Search.Twitter.com. It functions more like a Google for microblogging, and that’s not always a bad thing.

by Michelle Lentz

I follow Laura Fitton on Twitter and am usually either enlightened or entertained by her tweets. Her company, Pistachio Consulting, has released a paper and a comparison matrix on microblogging (or microsharing) tools used in corporations: Enterprise Microsharing Tools Comparison: Nineteen Applications to Revolutionize Employee Effectiveness. According the paper, there has been an uptick in this sort of corporate communication as the economy has a downturn and corporations cut back on travel costs.

Concurrently, employees see the collaboration, networking, problem-solving and other productivity benefits of web 2.0 tools and want to apply them at work. These tools directly contribute to knowledge capture and management as workforces are scaled back and baby boomers retire, and they boost motivation and retention, especially among millennial generation employees.

CIO magazine’s October survey of 243 IT executives found three-quarters plan to freeze or cut their IT budgets. There is a critical need for cheaper, more versatile ways for information to flow within the enterprise. Enterprise-grade versions of Twitter may be the low-cost solution that fills this need.

By researching 19 microsharing tools and their uses, the team came up with several key findings, including that your employees are probably already using some sort of microsharing tool and that these tools should also communicate with the “gold standard” of Twitter. The report goes on to define, and classify, these 19 different tools, listing advantages and disadvantages of each. Finally, they list the questions they asked users of these tools.

I’ll be referencing this paper in a presentation I’m giving on microblogging in education. As a big proponent of informal learning, I think microblogging helps inspire others to share and learn. “Watercooler learning” is evident in Twitter, and Laura touches, unintentionally perhaps, on these learning and training concepts.

Microsharing for organizational communication and collaboration fundamentally changes how employees interact with others and grow their professional capacity. Microsharing connects people in ways that promote mutual support, rapid networking, inspiration, mentoring and idea exchange.

This is incredibly useful for anyone looking to add a Twitter-like tool to their arsenal of internal corporate communications. As is pointed out in the paper, there aren’t any case studies yet, as usage is still too new.

You can download the paper and/or matrix free from Pistachio Consulting.

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Contact Michelle with your news, apps, and events via email, Twitter, Pownce, or FriendFeed. Visit Michelle at Wine-Girl.net and Write Technology. You can also catch Michelle presenting on Twitter at the upcoming DevLearn ’08 in San Jose.

by Michelle Lentz

The top prize at TechCrunch 50 went to Yammer. Yammer is a rather ingenious, and inevitable, application. At its simplest, it’s Twitter for the workplace. Instead of asking What are you doing?, Yammer asks What are you working on? I’ve always said that Twitter flattens the org chart. This takes that concept to a whole new level.

Yammer was developed by Geni for internal communications. It was such an internal hit that they decided to release it as a product. Here’s the kicker: Yammer has a business plan.

Right now, you must have a corporate email address to join Yammer. Employees can then follow each other, based on email address. You can also follow specific topics and people by using tags. Yammer is free for employees, but if a company wants to take control of thier network, that’s where the cost is incurred (and the profit for the Yammer folks).

Yammer has been live since Monday. According to the company, they had 2,000 organizations and 10,000 people sign up since launching. You can view the video from their TechCrunch presentation.

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Contact Michelle with your news, apps, and events via email, Twitter, Pownce, or FriendFeed. Visit Michelle at Wine-Girl.net and Write Technology.

by Michelle Lentz

It’s not unusual for me to turn to Twitter for technical support. When Parallels on my Mac wasn’t working correctly, I was able to troubleshoot using Twitter. When I was trying to get my Mac and my PCs to “speak” to each other, I got it working with aid from my Twitter friends. Non-technical? When I needed to write my first press release, I recieved tons of tips via Twitter, and several kind folks even edited the document for me.

So Lazy Tweet seems like a brilliant idea to me. In it’s own way, it’s a combination of Metafilter and Yahoo! Answers. If you have a question, you can tweet it to your own followers and friends. Use lazytweet or lazyweb (with or without hashtags or @) and the tweet will be picked up by @lazytweet and display on the Lazy Tweet page. You can watch for your answer,subscribe to their feed, or they’ll @ reply your answer to you on Twitter.

The advantage to Lazy Tweet is two-fold: your question is exposed to a wider audience than your immediate friends and followers, and you can play “expert” by answering questions to which you might know the answer.

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Contact Michelle with your news, apps, and events via email, Twitter, Pownce, or FriendFeed. Visit Michelle at Wine-Girl.net and Write Technology.

by Jacob Morgan

Koornk is European version (an eerily similar version) of our good friend twitter. I actually just signed up for Koornk not too long ago and while the majority of users appear to be from Croatia (I think) there is a setting that allows you to switch the language over to English. So what do I mean when I say the Koornk is an eerily similar version of twitter? Well, see for yourself.

Now if this isn’t a twitter clone then I don’t know what is. The layout is exactly the same as the twitter layout and the tabs are virtually identical as well. The overall design is pretty simple and sleek and does feel a little cleaner than the twitter UI. The characters are also limited to 150 instead of 140 (probably to make up for typing in @(someones name), and yes the ‘@’ works the same way in Koornk as it does in twitter.

Koornk does have a few neat features though, and to be honest I wish twitter would add a few of these as well. For example, Koornk neatly let’s you put links to your various sites, I know twitter has something similar but it looks a lot cleaner on Koornk. In addition Koornk also supports Open Id and actually lets you post to twitter from Koornk.

It looks like what we may start seeing is vertical growth for “microblogging” platforms. In other words a twitter type platform for various geographic areas, languages, or industries. Think of how search has evolved into a widely vertical market. When you want to find classified, most of the time you go straight to Craigslist instead of Google, when you want to find a car you will probably go to Edmunds.com, etc. In the next few years if “microblogging” takes off we may very well see similar growth. That is of course unless twitter gets it’s act together. Twitter does have the potential to be the Google of “microblogging” but with their lack of new features and frequent downtime’s this may be a perfect opportunity for all the Koornk’s out there.

I put “microblogging” in quotes because I don’t consider it to be a type of blogging, twitter is like a global messaging service, much like AIM or Gtalk. “Twitter isn’t microblogging” it’s messaging.

What do you think about Koornk and the future of twitter?

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by Michelle Lentz

12seconds.tv is launching their public alpha today. Its an invitation only alpha, but because you read bub.blicio.us, you can get your hands on one of the invites.

12seconds is a video status platform – sort of a Twitter for video. Using a cell phone or webcam, you record video blurbs that are 12 seconds in your life. That’s it – just 12 seconds. It’s multimedia microblogging. According to the web site, anything longer than 12 seconds is boring!

The new public alpha includes a number of new features including friend
search, video search, contact invites and the multi-player. Every user recieves their own video “channel” and an email address, so that you can easily send video from your cell phone on the go. The service integrates with Twitter and even allows you to import your Twitter friends. There are also options to share and embed the video elsewhere.

To get your invite, just fill out this short and simple survey. If you’re one of the first 200, you’ll get an invitation to the Alpha.

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Events, news, apps, and more – let me know at michelle[at]writetech[dot]net, via Twitter, Pownce, or FriendFeed. Visit Michelle at Wine-Girl.net and Write Technology.

by Michelle Lentz

One of my favorite desktop Twitter apps is Twhirl. Last night they released v0.8.4, which adds support for microblogging upstart Identi.ca and for seesmic.

If you’re not familiar with it, Identi.ca launched a few weeks ago, while Twitter was having some issues. A lot of folks headed over there – it’s an open-source microblogging platform. It doesn’t have a lot of features yet, but being open-source allows for some great things to be developed.

According to the Twhirl blog,

We received quite a few requests to add support for identi.ca to twhirl, and since they released a twitter-compatible API just a few days ago, we gave it a try. It was surprisingly easy, and worked out of the box. Plus, we were able to use the XMPP support we originally added for twitter to get real-time updates of messages from your followings. And of course we will make it available for other services as well once they support it.

Twhirl also now lets you add your account information for seesmic.  Even cooler – in the next version of Twhirl they plan to add support for recording to seemic. Nifty! (Of course, this should be a given considering that seesmic owns Twhirl.) Twirl also supports FriendFeed and can publish your Tweets to Pownce and Jaiku.

The latest Twhirl update should be automatically pushed to you if you have an older version of the software. If not, download the free desktop Twhirl app, for Mac or PC.

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Events, news, apps, and more – let me know at michelle[at]writetech[dot]net, via Twitter, Pownce, or FriendFeed. Visit Michelle at Wine-Girl.net and Write Technology.