ReadWriteWeb

If you've ever sent a tweet and thought "That seems so 1998" you're in good - and perhaps surprising - company.

Let's face it: Twitter doesn't let you hyperlink text, it doesn't thread conversations and, despite a redesign late last year, it still doesn't showcase video and photos as well as, say, that 845 million member social network that's about to go public. And Mike Brown, director of corporate development at Twitter, thinks its time for the microblogging service to drop its "command line" style in favor of something more contemporary.

Are you seemingly stuck with trying to suss out what to do with Twitter? Don't know how to get started? Does 140 characters seem daunting? Then you might want to take a look at a new O'Reilly book called Tweetsmart. There are lots and lots of Twitter-related books out there (Amazon lists more than 1600 books, including more than 500 of them available digitally as Kindle editions), this is the first one that is short and sweet and to the point. It is written by JS McDougall, the co-owner of a Web design firm who has written eight other tech books.

Yahoo is playing the press while trying to force Facebook into licensing between 10 and 20 of its patents.

Yahoo is making fairly standard claims in Web tech circles: that a hotter, younger company is infringing on patents Yahoo registered years ago and now needs to cut the former Web behemoth in on some of the action. But how Yahoo is going about its fight reads more like the script from a political thriller, complete with reportedly dropping a dime to the New York Times.

Microsoft launched msnNOW, a new site aimed at tracking news trends from social networks.

Although we're a bit skeptical about a spokesperson's claim in an email that it's "the first service designed to surface breaking trends from across the Web, show what people are saying about the trends, and why they matter with the help of expert editors," it does add Microsoft's heft to the growing news curation sector.

Engag.io launches to the public today. Imagine a Gmail inbox (in a good way), but for all your online conversations. That's Engag.io. But on top of that simple idea, Engag.io has features no one else provides for finding, following and expanding online conversations. If you're active in lots of places on the social Web, Engag.io will keep you sane.

A Gmail inbox for the whole social Web is what Fred Wilson, one of founder William Mougayar's first backers, asked him to build. It was a basic need conceived in conversation on AVC, Wilson's indispensable site. Now that Engag.io is built, Mougayar has closed a $540,000 seed round. The wired world feels such a need for the perfect unified inbox, and Engag.io has people coming out of the woodwork to bring it into being.

News agency Reuters launched Social Pulse, which it describes as a "social media hub" that will display "the most talked-about news, companies and influencers across the Web."

The site is unique in the news-curating space in that it uses trends from the Twitter accounts Reuters and its journalists follow to arrange headlines: in effect, the news agency is automating editing and story selection and putting it in the hands of "everyone from Nouriel Roubini and Jenna Wortham to John McCain and Rachel Sterne."

Well, there's a reason it's not called Dude-terest. The latest darling of the up-and-coming social sharing space, Pinterest, has experienced rapid growth in both users and industry buzz in the last few months. If you had a sneaking suspicion that the majority of those users happen to be young females, you were right.

Pinterest's users are 80% women, according to recent data from Google Ad Planner, as presented by Ignite Social Media. The site is biggest among the 25-34 age range, followed by 35-to-44-year-olds. These site's popularity among people in their late 20s and early 30s is illustrated (quite literally) by the proliferation of images related to wedding planning and home decor.

There are lots of social media monitoring dashboards out there, but a new service from Cyfe.com attempts to become the mother of all dashboards by combining more than a dozen different metrics into a single easy-to-track screen. You can sign up now for its beta and while you are limited to tracking just five items at once for the free account, it still is a pretty powerful service.

The folks at Flowtown have put together a quick reference guide to six different social media services. Called the SMB Social Media Cheat Sheet, it contains basic stats on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Google+, Tumblr and Digg. What, no LinkedIn? That is perhaps the biggest missing service, but otherwise the infographic, reproduced below, is worth bookmarking for those noobs in your company that are looking to learn more about each service.

Not even two years after reaching 1 million users, social audio service SoundCloud announced today that it has surpassed the 10 million user mark. The Berlin-based company has risen to become a major force in audio content creation and sharing on the Web, becoming a sort of "YouTube for audio" used by musicians, journalists and pretty much anybody with a need to record and share their own audio files.

To celebrate the milestone, the four-year-old startup has released an audio slideshow storytelling app called Story Wheel. It uses the Instagram API to grab a set of pictures, from which you can select the ones you want and order them. Once the photos are arranged, a brief narrative can be recorded in the browser. The end result is a shareable photo slideshow annotated by you.