Over the past few weeks, we’ve highlighted some tips and tricks for polishing your elevator and email pitch. If a pitch is designed to deliver a succinct presentation of your product or service, then it may be that the 140 character limitation of Twitter makes it a great venue for a pitch.

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Stowe Boyd is often credited with the idea of pitching via Twitter. He proposed the “Twitpitch” in order to help him schedule meetings with startups at the Web 2.0 Expo in 2008.

Twitter has grown in use and acceptance since Boyd’s idea for the Twitpitch, and the microblogging service can be a valuable site for entrepreneurs to pitch their ideas. But with the increasing level of chatter there, you need to make sure your pitch stands out. So if you do decide to use Twitter to pitch your ideas, here are a few things to keep in mind:

1: Pitch Publicly. If you target your message using the @ reply function, your conversations will only be seen by mutual followers and could be missed by others who might be interested in your idea. And if you use the direct message function, your tweet just ends up as an email would, without all the care and presentation of a full-blown email pitch. Of course, a public tweet runs the risk of being lost in the shuffle. And one of the drawbacks to pitching via Twitter is that, unlike the elevator or email pitches, you can’t really craft your pitch to suit your audience. If you want to have a bit more precision in your pitch, consider including a hashtag to link it with other conversations on the topic. (This is particularly useful when you plan to be onsite for an event, such as the Web 2.0 Expo.)

2. Complete your Twitter profile. Make sure your profile contains compelling and pertinent information about you and your company. Be sure to include your URL.

3. Include a URL in your tweet. If your tweet is a pitch, drive traffic to a webpage or blog post with more information about you, your company and your service. Consider linking to a page with a more elaborate pitch, not just merely to your home page. Whether you’re using a URL shortener (such as bit.ly) or not, it’s good to identify the type of link – a link to a blog post or a video, for example – so people know what to expect when they click.

3. Don’t use Twitter solely to pitch. There needs to be a compelling reason to follow you on Twitter and to pay attention to your tweets. If you only tweet self-promotional links and blurbs, chances are you aren’t going to maintain followers.

4. Don’t spam. While Twitter can be a great way to spread the message about your business, don’t repeatedly blast your followers with the same PR information.

5. Follow up. Twitter provides a real-time way to both monitor and participate in conversations. Do make sure that you aren’t just using Twitter to broadcast messages, but that you are actively engaging your followers as well.

There are numerous announcements you can pitch via Twitter: news, events, product launches, and employment opportunities, for example. But remember, as with the elevator pitch, it’s important to sell yourself, not just your products.

Discuss

Tweets about this, Tweets about that; there are Tweets flying all over Twitter about all kinds of things, but no easy way to display one or more of them gracefully on a website or blog. Until tomorrow, that is.

In a post today on the company’s blog for media companies interested in using the service, Twitter highlighted ReadWriteWeb’s use of screenshots in highlighting the smartest Tweets about last week’s HP/Palm deal. “But the truth, of course, is that a pasted-in image of a tweet is a bit of a hack,” the company wrote. “We have an alternative to propose; it’s coming tomorrow.” We emailed the company and they told us what it is!

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Robin Sloan, who works on Media Partnerships at Twitter, explained thusly:

The alternative is super-simple: just a little script that generates a block of HTML that looks just like an embedded tweet, but is just normal HTML text (instead of a flat image). Should be a handy tool — (I know I plan to use it a lot on Twitter Media).

That sounds like a small but exciting feature!

Uber-curator Robert Scoble has been talking about the need for some easier way to curate social media signals. Of this new feature, he told us by phone from Israel: “It’s nice. It’s a good little step along the path that we need to get to real time curation. I’d like to be able to bundle Tweets and tag them.” Scoble recently wrote about what he calls the 7 big-picture needs of real-time curators, and embedding Tweets wasn’t one of those. “A curator is an information chemist,” he wrote in that post. “He or she mixes atoms together in a way to build an info-molecule. Then adds value to that molecule.”

This is a little reminiscent of European blogger Robin Good’s argument a few years ago that a concept called Newsmastering was going to become the chic occupation at any firm with business touched by the online river of news. For some reason that hasn’t happened yet. It seems that online curation, editorial selection of items flowing through dynamic collections of online sources, has proven too removed from direct, immediate and crude value to have caught on with more than a handful of companies, most of which were already in the publishing business.

Twitter has high hopes for its favorite feature and may very well be adding more curation-type tones to that in the future, as well.

Either way, starting tomorrow, you’ll apparently be able to click a link and get some code you can paste onto a blog to display a Tweet. That’s cool.

Discuss

Twitter has released its first official application for Android 2.1 and Google will be open sourcing the code in the app soon. 

Twitter for Android app features a share button in your favorite applications for sharing links and images via Twitter.

The Twitter Blog provides more details. "Reading tweets is easy in a bunch of places on your phone. Quickly access your timeline with the home screen widget, view a tweet location on a map, and see your friend’s latest tweet in your phonebook, GoogleTalk list or any application that uses Android’s QuickContact bar."

"We had a great time working with the Android team and are thrilled that Google will be open sourcing the code used in this app in the near future. We look forward to the amazing experiences developers will create using Twitter APIs in their upcoming Android apps."
 

Prior to SXSW, we polled you on what location-based mobile app you would use during the festival. Brightkite and Foursquare were the most popular picks, with Gowalla third. We also polled you a year ago about this class of app and at that time Brightkite was a clear favorite.

As an attendee at SXSW, it seemed like Foursquare and Gowalla were the most used. Brightkite seemed to drop off the radar of SXSW attendees, but perhaps that was because Foursquare and Gowalla had the most press attention at that time. Whatever the case, it was an inconclusive result at SXSW and there was a sense that none of the 3 leading location-based mobile apps ‘won’ that battle. It’s now a month later, so we thought we’d poll you again to see which – if any – of these apps you use regularly now.

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Please add your vote to the poll below. You can also tweet your answer to @rww.

Which location-based mobile app do you use THE MOST?online survey

See also:

• Two-Thirds of iPhone Users Now Use Location-Based Services at Least Once a Week
• Top 10 Mobile Trends of 2010, Part 2: Apps, Apps, Apps

Join us at the ReadWriteWeb Mobile Summit on May 7, in Mountain View, CA, to discuss location-based apps and other hot topics in Mobile. If you’re in town for the Web 2.0 Expo that week, our Mobile Summit is the day after. We’d love to see you there! Register here.

Discuss

Last week, the big news in DMCA takedowns was the sweeping removal of Hitler parody videos. Earlier this year, it was Google suddenly wiping out six separate music blogs. Today, it’s the removal of a tweet.

While this might not seem like a big deal on the surface, it leads to some much bigger questions about free speech, what content should fall under a proper DMCA take-down and whether or not the DMCA is a legal method of applying censorship by any content owner.

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Here’s the story as told by TechDirt:

The story involves a music blogger named JP, who runs the appropriately named JP’s blog. Not surprisingly, JP also has a Twitter account, where he mostly seems to post links to his blog posts. One such post was about the leak of the new album by The National. That post includes a link to Amazon where people can purchase the new album… and also a link to a download of one song (in MP3 format) from the album.

According to JP’s blog post on the subject, Twitter sent him a message last Thursday “in response to a DMCA take-down notice”. The email, he writes, read as follows:

jp917, Apr 22 03:10 pm (PDT):
Hello,
The following material has been removed from your account in response to a DMCA take-down notice:
Tweet: http://twitter.com/jp917/statuses/12499491144 – New Post: Leaked: The National – High Violet http://jpsblog.net/2010/04/20/leaked-the-national-high-violet/

JP denies posting any link to the leaked album in his tweeted blog post, saying that he will not bother filing a counterclaim to the take-down. He also links to an article in Plagiarism Today from a year ago that alleges that Twitter’s handling of DMCA take-downs and counterclaims is problematic and that “there is clearly an organization issue here and that’s leading to confusion.”

While last weeks’ take-downs of parody videos may have been “overbroad take-downs of legal content”, as the Electronic Frontier Foundation asserted, this sort take-down may go an extra step, beyond constitutionally protected First Amendment speech. With the YouTube take-downs, at least there was copyrighted content present, although it may have been used according to the law in the end. In this case, according to JP, there was neither pirated content nor a link to any DMCA-violating content.

While TechDirt argues that “specifically, nothing in the tweet itself is infringing — which means that the DMCA take-down for the tweet is bogus, and a violation of the DMCA itself”, we spoke with David Sohn, senior policy council with the Center for Democracy & Technology, who said that the question might not be so cut and dry. Section 5.12D of the DMCA relates to cases involving “information location tools” and “links”.

“One possibility here is that Twitter has gotten a take-down notice that might not stand up as a totally valid take-down notice,” said Sohn.

On Sohn’s advice, we asked Wendy Seltzer, founder of ChillingEffects.org, what this all meant and she explained that the burden of proof lies with the person creating the content and not the platform. All the platform, in this case Twitter, needs to know is that the complaint may be valid and that, by removing the offending content, they cover themselves legally in the eyes of the DMCA. Whether or not section 5.12 D of the DMCA actually applies doesn’t really matter.

The introduction to her recent paper, “Free Speech Unmoored in Copyright’s Safe Harbor: Chilling Effects of the DMCA on the First Amendment” (.pdf), speaks clearly to the problem we saw when first reading this story:

Each week, more blog posts are redacted, more videos deleted, and more web pages removed from Internet search results based on private claims of copyright infringement. Under the “safe harbors” of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), Internet service providers are encouraged to respond to copyright complaints with content takedowns, assuring their immunity from liability while diminishing the rights of their subscribers and users. Paradoxically, the law’s shield for service providers becomes a sword against the public who depend upon these providers as platforms for speech.

The problem with the current format of the DMCA, especially in the case of something like a communication platform such as Twitter, is that a DMCA take-down notice becomes an extremely effective means of silencing information for a legally mandated period of 10 days. In essence, it provides those who wish to silence a voice a quick and legal means of enacting what is called a “prior restraint“, something clearly prohibited in First Amendment law.

“When non-infringing speech is taken down, not only does its poster lose an opportunity to reach an audience, the public loses the benefit of hearing that lawful speech in the marketplace of ideas,” writes Seltzer in the paper.

Twitter offered this response:

“Twitter regularly receives DMCA takedown notices. We strive to balance the interests of our users and copyright holders by reviewing each notice. After determining whether the notice is compliant with the law, we also consider other factors such as whether the notice is abusive to our users, or fails to take fair use into consideration. You can read more about our DMCA process here: http://help.twitter.com/entries/15795-copyright-and-dmca-policy

“We are always working to improve our transparency. Users are notified immediately when content has been removed from their account. In this situation, we responded to a request to remove a Tweet containing a link to download content from an unreleased album. After reexamining our decision, we believe this was the correct first step. If the affected user believes we have made a mistake or that the notice is in error, the appropriate thing for the user to do is file a counter-claim.

“We believe that the reasoning of the DMCA claim and its origin should be transparent to both the affected user and other interested parties. We are working on further steps to improve access to this information.”

So, our next logical question here is: Since this post includes the email from Twitter, which includes that original link to a blog post that supposedly linked to infringing content, can it too be removed according to the guidelines of the DMCA?

Discuss

Twitter announced this morning its acquisition of Cloudhopper, a startup it hopes will help it “become one of the highest volume SMS programs in the world.”

As Twitter notes in its blog post, the service was originally born on the back of SMS and the move looks to further emphasize this distinguishing factor.

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The acquisition seems to be a clear signal that Twitter is looking to expand further into areas where cost is a primary factor and the majority of users would interact with the service using SMS instead of desktop computers, smartphones or laptops.

“Twitter’s 140 character limit was designed specifically to allow for any tweet to be read in its entirety whether you’re using a rudimentary mobile phone, or a more sophisticated Internet enabled device,” the post explains. Now, the company processes nearly one billion SMS tweets a month and that number is growing. So how does Cloudhopper fit into this?

Cloudhopper “supplies the underlying software and infrastructure to reliably scale and geographically disperse some of the world’s highest volume messaging programs” according to the company’s website. The service handles both SMS and MMS (text and multimedia) messaging in North America, Europe and Africa.

As part of the acquisition, Joe Lauer and Kristin Kanaar will be joining Twitter’s mobile team.

Discuss

I love to sit on the beach.  One of the coolest things about the beach is the number of layers of visual depth.  Look at the sand and it’s beautiful, but zoom your eyes in closer and you’ll see a whole layer of life running around on the sand that you didn’t see before.  Look even closer and you can see individual grains of sand, water and light dancing between them.  Look closer still and you see that each grain of sand is a unique object with its own texture.  If your eyes are strong enough, or you have a machine to help you, you can see even more layers by looking closer still.

That’s what Twitter is going to be like with the launch of Twitter Annotations this Summer. It’s a beautiful vision, with huge potential, but there’s another way to look at this analogy: you don’t build on the beach sand because it shifts too much. Will Annotations live up to its incredible promise?

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What Annotations Are

Last week Twitter announced a forthcoming feature called Twitter Annotations: it’s a system for almost any metadata to be connected to any Twitter message when it’s published. Inside every Tweet is now a space where you could put or find anything, including links out to further instructions or larger bodies of information. That’s always been the case with the 140 characters of content – but now we’re talking about systematic metadata intended for machines, to augment the content. The idea is dripping with potential, but also some risk.

Twitter has been considering adding Annotations for at least two years, according to Platform Team member Raffi Krikorian. That’s a relatively large portion of the company’s young life. Every time a new bit of metadata was added to Tweets, like geolocation information was last Fall, the company would ask itself “should we be doing this, or should we just open up the platform for and and all metadata?”

Now the company has decided to do just that. Twitter publishing tools can now add a description to any tweet their users publish, not as a part of the 140 character message, but as a small machine-readable metadata field that travels along with the content.

What might this look like? We could see Annotations fields like:

• Link to a media file, like podcast enclosures, photos linked to, etc.
• Context about the Tweet like where was the author when it was published, maybe what the weather was like there at the time.
• Your Twitter publishing interface could offer you a special option to write reviews of movies, books, or links you’re sharing. The ISBN of the book, a link to a preview of the movie and the number of stars in your rating could be included in the Tweet Annotations.
• Any way you can classify, describe, append or otherwise enrich a Tweet with words or numbers can be included in Annotations.

You Tweet, you attach a characteristic or quality, you define the characteristic and then you provide a value of how or what that Tweet did relative to the quality being referenced. Twitter clients like Seesmic, Tweetdeck and more will make it easy for users to add these annotations. Yes, this is meaningful in large part because of the 140 character limit on Twitter messages themselves, but isn’t much of life’s meaning found in the play between limits and the infinite?

From Annotations Come Analysis

Annotating a single Tweet is uninteresting, it’s when you hit the Twitter databases and gather together all the Tweets that share a characteristic that thinks get exciting. When those selected Tweets can then be cross-referenced with other sets of data from outside Twitter – that’s when the word fecund starts feeling inadequate.

Show me all the Tweets from my friends that have links to music and play me those songs. Twitter clients like Seesmic, Tweetdeck and others are going to make viewing that kind of data a whole lot easier.

Tweetmeme’s Nick Halstead believes that Annotations will be used most extensively to communicate webhooks, links to instructions for a Twitter client to follow. He thinks it will enable game play and help Twitter start acquiring more users again.

“Because of the size of the data you can put in the annotations, I think people will come up with links to offsite resources. Seesmic is building their own platform for Windows to support plug-ins, but this reaches much further, but this lets Twitter clients augment a tweet with other services. Sf you were Stocktweets, you could attach a link in the namespace that’s in stocktweets, Seesmic could follow that link back to Stocktweets and ask it how to render it. So you could put a chart and any other associated information. It’s like FBML [Facebook Markup Language], the ability to embed applications inside the Twitter clients. Maybe threaded conversations. A game of Scrabble where the link points at a currently rendered scrabble board, so other people could look at the board and join in playing it. Annotations and webhooks would allow gaming to start happening on Twitter.”

Halstead believes an Alpha version of Annotations could be made available to developers in a month.

How about showing me all the Tweets from anyone that are referencing the President of the United States (subject: POTUS?), analyze the sentiment in the messages, show me where those Twitter users were located and tell me how those local sentiments change over time. Send me an alert when one of those starts to shift radically.

Show me all the Tweets by people in their 20′s and in their 50′s (imagine an author age tag in Annotations, why not?), living near the site of a disastrous event. How do those discussions differ?

There are all kinds of interesting questions that could be tackled when the developer world’s imagination runs wild on the terms of description applied to our messages.

Of course it will be tempting to draw all kinds of conclusions from this rich data. We’ll surely be able to draw a whole lot of value from it. “You can learn something from almost anything,” Big Data cruncher and 80Legs CEO Shion Deysarkar says. “Just give me enough data, I’ll figure out something.”

But let’s keep in mind the words of social network scientist danah boyd, who wrote the following on her blog this morning:

Time and time again, I see computational scientists mistake behavioral traces for cultural logic…Big Data creates tremendous opportunities for those who know how to assess the context of the data and ask the right questions into it. But mucking with Big Data alone is not research. And seeing patterns in Big Data is not the same as hypothesis testing. Patterns invite more questions than they answer.

Tweet Power Politics

Twitter’s Krikorian says the site will probably list “trending annotations” just like it lists trending topics today. There will probably be a wiki where anyone can find out what namespaces are being used for what purposes.

Really though, the classification system is going to be determined by the market. That’s something that worries a lot of people. “People who believe in building standards are conerned about our blase attitude about how we want to run annotations,” Krikorian says. He believes that the developer community will work things out for itself, just as it has in the past. “There has been a lot of emergent behavior around how to relate to tweets anyway, without our imposing much structure around it. The Twitter platform is continuously evolving – the developers will figure it out. Twitter developers iterate in public.”

That’s likely to be cold comfort for people focused on the power of structured data standards. Many people are calling for Twitter to embrace the well-built efforts of the Semantic Web community. Krikorian says that 90% of Twitter developers don’t know what the Semantic Web is but that there’s certainly room for standards lovers to work within the Annotations scheme.

Still, the absence of standard terminology could really be a problem. Annotations can’t be changed retroactively, either. Krikorian says that major players will dominate the obvious use cases for Annotations and the company will monitor and highlight really innovative Annotations developed by people on the margins.

We’ll see how well that will work.

Imagination will make the sky the limit for this publishing platform used easily by more than 100 million people around the world. But a shortage of forethought, planning and agreed-upon standards may bring that platform’s aspirations back down to earth quickly in the future. Time will tell.

Discuss

This morning’s presentations from Chirp, Twitter’s developer conference, have showcased the growth and the innovation of the service.

A few of the statistics announced this morning include:

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• Twitter has 105,779,710 registered users
• 300,000 new users sign up per day
• Approximately 60% of them are coming from outside the U.S
• Twitter receives 180 million unique visitors per month
• 75% of Twitter traffic comes from third-party applications
• 60% of all tweets come from third-party apps
• Since the new Blackberry application was launched, it has accounted for 7 to 8% of new sign
• Twitter now has 175 employees, up from 25 one year ago
• There are 600 million search queries on Twitter per day
• There are over 100,000 Twitter applications
• Twitter gets 3 billion requests a day through its API
• 37% of active Twitter users use their phone to tweet

While the company is making several announcements at Chirp, including the archival of all public tweets since 2006 with the Library of Congress, these statistics confirm the impressive growth and potential of Twitter.

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The Library of Congress said today it will digitally archive every public tweet since Twitter’s launch in March 2006.

On the Library of Congress blog Matt Raymond writes, "That’s a LOT of tweets, by the way: Twitter processes more than 50 million tweets every day with the total numbering in the billions."

The Library of Congress announced the news in this tweet: Library acquires ENTIRE Twitter archive. All tweets.

Raymond offers more details about the Library acquiring the entire Twitter archive. "So if you think the Library of Congress is ‘just books,’ think of this: The Library has been collecting materials from the web since it began harvesting congressional and presidential campaign websites in 2000.  Today we hold more than 167 terabytes of web-based information, including legal blogs, websites of candidates for national office, and websites of Members of Congress."

A few examples of important tweets include:

The first-ever tweet from Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey (http://twitter.com/jack/status/20), President Obama’s tweet about winning the 2008 election (http://twitter.com/barackobama/status/992176676), and a set of two tweets from a photojournalist who was arrested in Egypt and then freed because of a series of events set into motion by his use of Twitter (http://twitter.com/jamesbuck/status/786571964) and (http://twitter.com/jamesbuck/status/787167620).

Earlier today Google announced a new search option that allows users to view an archive of tweets on any topic in a timeline format.
 

Why do people care how Twitter will make money? “We won’t know where we, the users, fit in — until they tell us how they’re going to make money,” Dave Winer wrote a year ago this week, “And when they tell us, we may not like it.” That’s one reason why people care how Twitter makes money.

Whether you’re a person concerned that the popular social network you’re investing your time and energy in might monetize in an anti-social way, or you’re a skeptic who refuses to believe that the world-changing potential of Twitter is real until it proves itself economically viable – you probably heard that Twitter announced tonight it’s got a plan for advertisements. You can breathe a sigh of relief; the plan is downright boring, just as it should be.

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Advertisements will begin in search, with keywords being bid on and a single advertisement appearing with frequency dependent on its performance. Then the ads will be extended to 3rd party applications like TweetDeck and others. It’s unclear who will use it, Tweetie got bought by Twitter last week and Twitterific has its own ads, but other apps will come and go, hopefully given the option (not the requirement) to show Twitter ads to their users.

Finally, ads will begin to appear on Twitter.com, tailored to the interests of users, as easily observed by their messages published and received.

This is great: it’s relatively non-invasive, nothing too crazy, nothing terribly exploitive. Some people who insist on reading every Tweet in their stream will probably be annoyed once they find ads in it, but there are already lots of unofficial ads being published on Twitter and maybe this will break those people of the habit of obsessing over every little message.

This is surely not the intention behind the plan, Twitter HQ itself is full of people who spend time carefully pruning their streams. Twitter’s new head of PR Sean Garrett, for example, quit following NBC’s @newmediajim and media analyst Shelly Palmer last week, something it’s hard to imagine him doing for any reason other than concern about signal-to-noise ratio and an unhealthy concern with reading every one of the Tweets in his stream.

But the point is this: it appears that no baby animals will be hurt in the making of the Twitter.

Along with the big search deals with Google, Microsoft and Yahoo, and the forthcoming availability of power Commercial Accounts, Twitter seems to have found relatively non-violent ways to monetize. As long as the firehose of user activity data is in fact made more widely available and not kept from small innovators, and as long as regular accounts aren’t handicapped in order to make commercial accounts more appealing – then these three plans together look pretty good.

It’s not banner ads, it’s not sales of data to direct marketers, it’s not licensing access to Direct Messages to the CIA. Twitter is at its best when it keeps things simple, when it stays out of the way and acts like a dumb, if textured, pipe. Put a contextual ad up to keep the lights on, what do I care?

It’s entirely predictable, shouldn’t hurt too much and might even work. As Liz Gannes said so well in her headline at Gigaom tonight: “The Twitter Ad Model Revealed (What Were You Expecting, a Pony?)”

Update: Twitter’s Biz Stone posted to the company’s blog about this at one minute after midnight. He didn’t say much that was new but he did title the post “Hello World,” implying that this is in some ways the real beginning for Twitter.

Discuss

Viadeo, the social network for business, has added five applications built on Google’s OpenSocial platform. These apps are Twitter, YouTube, PollDaddy, a doc sharer called Ayos iShare and Google Presentation.

iShare will allow users to upload any file up to 100 MB and post it for download on their account. The Twitter app will allow a user to post their Tweet automatically on their Viadeo page. The Google Presentation function will allow them to convert Powerpoint presentations to Google and share them.

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Viadeo is down in the ranks. Compete.com gives LinkedIn over 14 million visitors a month compared to 157,000 for Xing and 96,000 for Viadeo. Certainly, the ability of users to branch out and back with these apps should make it more appealing.

The question remains, however, not which business-focused social networks have the most features, or the most users, but the most utility. In that respect, I fear they are neck and neck. After years on the service, and over a year on unemployment, all I got, even with an old supervisor firing me job ads via LinkedIn, was a quick phone interview that went nowhere. That’s a guy with some experience, at some high-profile companies, actively searching, with friends on the look-out.

ReadWriteWeb has theorized before that part of the limitations of LinkedIn, in particular, is the fact that it’s a walled system. If its API opened up, it would benefit the social web as a whole, perhaps. But would it help the job seeker? The hiring manager? The sales or biz dev person looking for contacts? I am not sure.

But one person’s experience could be anomalous. So let me ask you, the ReadWriteWeb reader: What difference has your membership in a business-oriented social network like LinkedIn, Xing or Viadeo made in your career in the last year?

Discuss

When things change, especially if they change dramatically, we often yield to the temptation to hail this alteration as permanent. That change is particularly obvious when we regard our technology. But things that change, sometimes change back, or at least alter further, in ways we can’t anticipate.

So, although Blackberry sales have declined relative to iPhone and Android, Blackberry remains a force in mobile, and tonight, Blackberry users can now Twitter from their devices using a dedicated app.

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Features include:

• Tweet and reply notifications
• List builder
• Profile editing
• Change app appearance
• Strong caching
• Push notifications
• Short URLs
• Auto updating

Discuss

Soon, Twitter users will be in a better position to get satisfaction with the companies that they do business with. This morning, SalesForce.com is announcing that the Chatter beta developer preview has grown to 500 companies and is integrated with its popular Service Cloud offering. The company has shown its ability to leverage the disruption of social media – rather than be disrupted by it.

We had a chance to review the new tools and experience what an end-to-end social media driven customer experience looks like. It was eye-opening for us – and is coming soon to the 70,000-plus customers of SalesForce platform.

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The first thing we learned in our briefing with SalesForce is that the company has fully digested the reality of the new web. The company talks about how it started on a mission to bring the power of great web applications like Amazon.com to enterprise customers. Now, ten years later, the web and the company have moved on towards the new dominant engagement model on the web, Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter.

Here is a graph the SalesForce team shared with us on the emerging trend of Internet usage, a key driver in how the Chatter product has been considered.

SalesForce makes a case that a fundamental shift is underway and its completely re-factoring the engagement model. The company calls it the “Facebook Imperitive”, which we interpret as “be as social and easy to use as Facebook, or whither”. Reminiscent of the Wired Magazine’s “Wired: Tired” lists SalesForce shares its observations of the fundamental shifts in the industry. We see Amazon.com as the old incumbent leader of the Internet being replaced by Facebook. Also series of observations that show the landscape change dominated by mobile, location, and web standards.

Here, we see a Chatter enabled service desk, where we can easily see the different channels that have opened tickets for customer service.

A case that has been opened via Twitter is seen in the dashboard here. It can be shared among team members, or escalated. We think this is an interesting evolution of the “follower” mechanic borrowed from Twitter. In this case, you can be assigned a topic to follow, since in the enterprise there is a job to be done.

Here, we see the familiar Twitter interface as the origination point of the case being managed internally.

From what we learned, several marquee customers such as Bank of America plan on rolling out Chatter plus Service Cloud. Shown here is the Bofa Twitter feed responding to individuals in the public forum.

Some of the productivity benefits offered by Chatter plus Service Cloud offered by the company are listed here:

• “Monitoring Priority Cases: Service agents can stay on top of high priority cases, updates to critical knowledge articles, and the latest product updates
• Locating Expertise: Service agents can follow experts across their organization and instantly get help from other agents, other departments, or from across the company
• Real-Time Case Collaboration: For high priority cases, service supervisors can assemble the best expertise and information to close complex cases faster
• SLA Management: Salesforce Chatter proactively can alert service agents of upcoming service level agreement milestones that they must meet
• Sales-Service Alignment: Service agents and sales reps can share the latest case and opportunity updates for their customer to ensure good service means good business”

We think there could be several big winners with SalesForce Chatter release.

• SalesForce may have found its way into the entire enterprise, where it becomes essential to connect departments and individuals together in the best collaboration model possible.
• Twitter seems like a big winner here, where it is now being demonstrated as the front end to customer service relationships. This pattern has been developing for several years with leaders like Comcast servicing customers with Twitter. Now, its moving to the next level where when you Tweet an issue, you’ll essentially be opening a ticket. And, where tickets are opened, you can be sure that it is someone’s job to close them. It seems that Twitter being cemented into enterprise processes just like the telephone of yesteryear.
• Consumers win by getting faster answers with less searching in document bases, or waiting in call center queues. Consumers also win by bringing speed and transparency to the process. No longer, will we wait on hold all alone, as we’re bringing our followers with us with every Tweet.
• IT departments that have invested in document management and other solutions will now be able to extend their reach
• Customer service departments that have the job of closing tickets and meeting SLAs (Service Level Agreements)

Welcome to the future of customer service, no telephone required, but your smart mobile device is definitely invited.

Do you believe SalesForce.com onto the next big shift in enterprise computing with the upcoming launch of Chatter?

Photo credits: Salesforce.com

Discuss

As we reported last week, some significant news was announced regarding the open web, and the direction social networking is headed in. Cliqset and Status.net announced that for the first time ever, the users of two independent, public web entities are able to communicate with each other, without being on the same service as the person they are communicating with. These two services accomplished this using the Salmon protocol, a technology that’s already on Google’s list to implement with Buzz.

Would you find value in communicating with a user of a social network you didn’t belong to? Tell us what you think.

I reached out to Google’s own open web advocate, Chris Messina, to get his thoughts on this milestone and its significance for social networking, and for businesses.

What’s it Mean for Social Networking?

"I do think that Salmon is a very important building block technology for the open, social web," Messina tells WebProNews. "It basically provides a mechanism for what I would call ‘personal trackbacks’ or ‘social pingbacks’ — to borrow the blogging term."

Imagine: If Facebook, Twitter, Google Buzz, and MySpace all implemented Salmon in the way that Cliqset and Status.net have. Users of any one of these services could communicate with users on any of the others without having to be part of those other communities. For example, if I’m a Facebook user, but not a Twitter user, I could respond to a tweet from somebody from my Facebook account, which they would see on Twitter. All the while, I do not have a Twitter account. They could then in turn respond to me, and I would see that in my Facebook account.

Right now, social network users can’t do this, unless they’re using Cliqset and Status.net, but depending on how widely this gets adopted, it could become more of a standard in the future, which would make for increased competition in the social network space. People wouldn’t necessarily have to join Facebook just to stay in touch with all of their friends and family who use it. If they liked MySpace better, for example, they could continue using that as their preferred social network, and still communicate with anybody else. As Marshall Kirkpatrick recently suggested, this would mean social networks would have to strive to innovate more, to keep users from simply moving elsewhere.

"This is a great demonstration of Cliqset’s larger vision of social networks being siteless, and we think it’s going to be the future of how all services interact and, more importantly, how users of these services interact," Cliqset told us earlier.

"With the ability to mention someone on one service and then send a verified ping to the recipient’s service, we get one step closer to decentralizing social networks in the same way that email was decentralized a decade or longer ago," Messina says. "For today, this means that if you prefer to use Cliqset, and I use Status.net — but I want to talk to you without signing up for Cliqset  — Salmon will make that possible!" (emphasis added)

"Put another way, let’s say that I post a photo to both Flickr and my blog, and let’s presume that I would like to have one unified set of comments for that object — rather than two distinct streams of comments," Messina adds. "Salmon provides the mechanism to sync those two channels so that, once again, Flickr users can use Flickr, and my blog readers can read my blog."

What Impact Could This Have for Businesses?

Social networking has become a significant part of marketing, customer service, branding, and engaging with customers. It only makes sense that if social networking were to become more open in the way that widespread Salmon adoption would allow, business communication channels could open up along with them. Communication would improve.

"The benefits for business become clear then: produce quality content, syndicate to any number of services or aggregators, and then use Salmon as a way to host distributed conversations across the web — rather than in several disconnected contexts," says Messina. "This means more engagement and higher convenience for publishers — and a more familiar experience for content consumers."

What are the odds?

A lot still has to happen for social networking in general to reach this point. Right now, we’re really only at the beginning. Cliqset and Status.net are hardly representative of social media as a whole. However, Google Buzz, while certainly not as dominant as say, Facebook, will be implementing Salmon sooner or later, and you can bet others will follow. Kirkpatrick made the point that because Salmon is open source, any service can implement it without formal business relationships.

"If a substantial portion of the technical community implements Salmon, Facebook could be under a lot of pressure to do so as well. (As it was with OpenID, for example)," he says.

Facebook’s best interest, however, is to keep users using Facebook itself. Considering Facebook already has such a significant share of the population, you have to wonder how much it would really lose if it adopted this. It may also be in Facebook’s best interest to keep users happy, and that could potentially include tearing down a wall for users who don’t want to be closed off from the rest of the world.

Time will tell if this all comes to fruition, but Cliqset and status.net have shown that it can be done, and that’s an important first step.

Would you like to see social networks open up to cross-communication? Share your thoughts here.