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Douglas Rushkoff spoke at Pivot, a conference on branding, last year and recently linked to a video of his talk. It's worth watching if you're involved in social CRM or any other sort of social business.

For the first approximately 20 minutes of the talk, Rushkoff rants about the corporatization of the Internet and summarizes his book Life Inc. He explains the origins of the modern corporation during the mercantilist period of European economic development, and how branding came about as a means to put a friendly face on mass production. But during the final 10 minutes, Rushkoff gives some practical advice to companies trying to make sense of the social Web.

As the social Web expands, it becomes continually easier for large corporations to communicate with their customers wherever they spend their time online. Facebook and Twitter have attracted big brands because that's where the customers are, but failing to use these services to their own unique potential is just as easy as setting up an account. Some new stats released by digital agency 360i second this notion - showing that brands on Twitter are failing to truly grasp the essence of the popular micro-blogging service.

A spin-off of Finnish software development company Nodeta, Flowdock aspires to help developers and others sift out actionable bits of knowledge from ongoing conversations and make them retrievable. Their team messenger services allows separation and tagging of conversational elements.

"In Flowdock, the epiphany comes when you tag a chat message for the first time," Nodeta and Flowdock's CTO Otta Hilska wrote us. "You realize how you just took a piece of conversation and turned it into a nugget of knowledge. Somebody talked about a bug, and you turned it into a bug report. Or pasted a snippet of code, and you categorized and organized it. The real validation for the concept comes when you are looking for some other snippet of code, a link to a partner, an eBook or something else and come to think 'I wonder if it's tagged in Flowdock". Sure enough it will be.'"

Conversations around blog posts now often happen offsite on social networks like Twitter and Facebook. Sadly, a lot of plugins that try to bring these conversation back to the blog end up being somewhat useless, as large numbers of retweets can easily overshadow the more interesting tweets. Twitter search engine BackType just launched a major update to its search engine and a new WordPress plugin that aim to combat this problem. Starting today, BackType will filter out uninteresting tweets from its search results and its widgets.

The beta launch of Google Wave has once again put the spotlight on the shortcomings of email. Wave tries to be everything for everybody, but others, like the recently launched Nurphy, have opted for a more focused approach. Nurphy, founded by Paul Horsfall and Neil Cauldwell, wants to be a replacement for email conversations with multiple recipients. The result is an interesting mix between email, Twitter, Yammer and IM that is aimed at both business and casual users.