by Michelle Lentz

Last Thursday, Twitter rolled out the new Search features to everyone. While my professional account was in the beta, my personal account has now caught up and I have the features on both accounts. I first blogged about the integrated search in February. Those changes were refined and rolled out to beta users throughout March and April. Now, everyone is reaping the benefit of the beta period.

If you only use a desktop or mobile app, it’s worth taking a few minutes to log into Twitter.com and explore the new features. Search and trends are now built into the left column. Click any trend and the results appear on your Twitter.com page.

Search works the same way. Instead of heading out to search.twitter.com, you can search and view results from within your Twitter profile.  Searches can also be saved, allowing to you basically track your own trending topics.

Saved Searches, Trending Topics, and Following are now collapsible so that you control how much information you see.

Basically, all of those great features you love so much in Tweetdeck and Seesmic Desktop are now available directly from Twitter.com. What do you think of the new roll-out?

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Contact Michelle with news, stories, events, and more.
Email: michelle[at]writetech[dot]net
Twitter: @writetechnology, Friendfeed: michellel
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by Michelle Lentz

It was Laura Fitton, I think, who coined the term microsharing. I think it’s a great way to express a lot of what happens on Twitter (or Yammer, or Jaiku, etc). I certainly prefer it to microblogging.

I discovered two things today that make sharing some things a bit easier – specifically, code snippets and songs.

Song.ly makes it simple to share your current mood music with your Twitter followers. You need to be listening to music online – the MP3 needs a URL.  Just go to Song.ly and paste in the URL of the MP3 file you want to share and click Preview. Song.ly creates a widget you can post to Twitter. When your Twitter friends view the flash-based widget, they can hear and share the song.

Obviously this one is aimed more at programmers, but Snipt is an easy way to share code via Twitter. You can upload a snippet of code and generate a short link for sharing on Twitter. Over 100 programming languages are supported. Snippets are color coded and you have the option to add line numbers.

Of course, Snipt might be more useful than Song.ly, which is pretty much just fun. What else do you share on Twitter?
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Contact Michelle with news, stories, events, and more.
Email: michelle[at]writetech[dot]net
Twitter: @writetechnology
Friendfeed: michellel
Blogs: Write Technology, Wine-Girl.net

Nominee for City Beat’s Best of the City: Vote for My Wine Education under Public Eye > Blog:
http://www.bestofcincinnati.com/

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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Contact Michelle with news, stories, events, and more.
Email: michelle[at]writetech[dot]net
Twitter: @writetechnology
Friendfeed: michellel
Blogs: Write Technology, Wine-Girl.net

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.