ReadWriteWeb

Once upon a time, microblogging was all about simplicity. Today, even services like Posterous that started out as very simple and easy-to-use tools have begun to add more and more features. Microblogging, however, can't get much simpler than TXT.io. The service offers nothing more than a simple text interface. No more, no less. You log in with a Google account, type your message and hit "post."

Yammer came to the market with one of the first microblogging services. In the span of their existence, a number of companies launched their own versions of an activity stream. But Yammer looks like they have the customers to prove they have a hold on their sector of the market.

An all-star team is forming at StatusNet, the open microblogging service for businesses and communities. The newest addition is Jon Phillips, former community and business development manager for Creative Commons.

Phillips joins Brion Vibber, who came from the Wikimedia Foundation where he served as chief technology officer.

Yammer is a "Twitter for the enterprise" platform that (to our dismay) won TechCrunch50 last year. A year later the enterprise microblogging space is growing rapidly and Yammer is still moving forward, along with competitors like Socialcast and Socialtext Signals. Today Yammer has announced a pair of Microsoft-centric additions that should be big for business users: an Outlook plug-in and a Windows Mobile app. Outlook is still huge in the enterprise, and a decent working integration with it should be an easier sell than any other kind of desktop access.

Enterprise collaboration company Socialtext has launched a mobile edition of its software suite, giving its customers better access to its activity streams, wikis, microblogging and more for the first time. The beta of Socialtext mobile is available now for all users.

Rather than a native application tailored to the iPhone, BlackBerry, or Android, Socialtext chose to create a mobile browser version that is cross-platform by default. The site will detect when you're logging on through a mobile device and redirect you to a subdomain with a custom UI built to resemble Socialtext's desktop app.

Socialcast has released their official API today, opening up their real-time enterprise collaboration platform to developers for the first time.

Socialcast's basic collaborative feature set isn't in dire need of enhancement through an API. But what it will definitely bring is a higher level of customization and better access to the real-time stream of information it's aimed at creating within the enterprise.

Socialcast, the enterprise microblogging platform, thinks that HR and C-level executives deserve extra recognition in the corporate status stream. Its new Broadcast Message feature gives announcements by higher-ups priority if they want it, effectively creating the Reply All of the micro-messaging world.

For a startup whose entire value proposition is software that transforms work, the idea of enabling preexisting corporate hierarchies is an ill-considered move. Corporate hierarchy is what makes the enterprise tick, no doubt about it. But in communication, what's needed is reducing noise, not the means to create more of it.

Disclosure: Socialtext is sponsor of the ReadWriteEnterprise channel.

Hot new trends are hard to resist, especially when they open up lucrative new markets. For proof positive, look no further than Socialtext, which today released a Microblogging Appliance independent of the rest of their enterprise collaboration offering.

Long an advocate of the integrated approach to social software, this is the first time Socialtext has unbundled any part of their software. In addition to competing with startups like Yammer and Socialcast, the company aims to use the appliance as a teaser for their complete platform.

While taking questions yesterday about alleged violation of anti-trust laws, Google execs including CEO Eric Schmidt reportedly told press that the company is, in the words of Reuters scribe Alexei Oreskovic, "looking at ... ways of integrating microblogging capabilities, such as those popularized by Twitter, into its search product."

That's news to us. Everything these days is about Twitter, though. Go to a party--talk about Twitter. Have a blog? Talk about Twitter. Use Twitter? Talk about Twitter. Apparently we can add to that: facing legal pressure over allegedly anti-competitive business practices? Talk about Twitter. There's absolutely no more information available about this - but below are three possible scenarios we can imagine for Google integrating microblogging into its search product.

Last summer, while Twitter was struggling to keep its servers running consistently, a number of rivaling microblogging services like Plurk and Rejaw arrived on the scene, ready to capitalize on the imminent exodus of Twitter's disgruntled users. Twitter, however, was able to turn its fortunes around and is now just about as stable as any other online service. It is also growing at an impressive rate and has become the de facto standard for microblogging in most users' minds. For Twitter's competitors, however, this has meant that there are fewer users to go around, and today, Rejaw announced that it will shut down its servers on May 31st.

In December, Movable Type announced a new product called "Motion," which integrates activity streams, microblogging, and portable identities into a software package that can be installed into the company's hosted publishing platform, Movable Type Pro. Now, after much testing and feedback, Motion for Movable Type has become publicly available. With this software, built on open standards, blogs can add social activity streams to their site. These are similar in appearance to those from the social web aggregation service FriendFeed, but are entirely within the blog owner's control. Motion also adds a social networking element to online communities with its user profiles and authentication tools that permit signing in from any provider, including Google, Yahoo, AOL, Facebook, or OpenID.

If you imagine a mashup of a micro-blogging site with a very pretty photo and video sharing service, with good privacy controls and an innovative user interface thrown in for good measure, you might come up with something akin to thisMoment. ThisMoment, which is still in private beta, is one of the prettier sites we have reviewed in the recent past. The idea behind thisMoment is that you can upload photos and videos from special moments in your life to the site, which then displays them in a beautiful user interface. The site, however, is flexible enough to also make it a very capable all-purpose photo and video micro-blogging service.

Who uses cross-posting social media app Ping.fm? A lot of people do, but now you can add LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman and Creative Commons Foundation Chairman Joi Ito to the list. The two are among the most high profile angel investors in the startup world and they've both just put money into Ping.fm, according to a post on the company's blog this morning.

The service lets users send a message through one interface (SMS, IM, web publishing tools) and then automatically cross posts it to more than 30 other social networking sites. It's a way to broadcast your messages into more networks than you could otherwise participate in. Now with some very visible investment, the company should be able to scale and roll out even more features.

Web 2.0 Asia is reporting that Me2Day - a Korean microblogging service likened to Twitter - has been acquired by Naver - the most popular search portal in Korea - for 2.2 billion Korean Won, which equates to roughly $2 million US.

The cyn.in desktop client from a company called Cynapse is a new application that brings microblogging to the corporate desktop. Powered by Adobe AIR, the client is intended to improve collaboration between teams through its real-time "Activity Stream" of events which makes communication quick and easy.

Vator.tv, a social media site for entrepreneurs, announced a micro-blogging service for startups today that allows these companies to update their followers about the latest developments at their companies. This micro-blogging service works similar to Twitter, though the character limit has been raised from 140 to 280. Currently, only ten companies are using this feature during the alpha program, as Vator.tv was worried about potential scalability issues. These ten companies are Occipital, Nimbuzz, Blippr, Indaba Music, Crispy Gamer, Wize, Ignighter, Famplosion, Vayyoo, and Buzzd. Vator.tv expects to roll out a larger beta program within the next month.

The team behind microblogging service Pownce announced on the company blog today that it is joining blog software company SixApart and closing Pownce in two weeks. Pownce left private beta with a big launch just 11 months ago but the service never grew beyond a core group of fans.

The Pownce team says it plans to "come back with something much better in 2009." We're excited to see what Pownce co-founders Leah Culver and Mike Malone do at SixApart; it should be a very good environment for them to innovate in.

In a time of widespread economic downturn, a number of companies powering a new form of communication are bulking up their teams with new staff. Twitter, its leading open source competitor Laconi.ca and the high-profile enterprise service Yammer have all made new hires or announced hires coming in the past week. We're tracking hires in this sector over on our new site, Jobwire.

This growth makes sense given the rush of new users these companies must be experiencing. It's not just growing hype, either. The combination of collaboration, intelligence gathering and ease of use make micro-messaging or micro-blogging a compelling addition to millions of peoples' work and personal lives.

Twitter. It's either the stupidest thing on the internet or it's an essential tool in your workday. Most people feel one way or the other about the service and the biggest indicator of which direction anyone goes is whether they've spent more or less than a full day learning how to use the service.

For the scores of people now convinced that a group micromessaging service like Twitter can be powerfully useful, there are few prospects as interesting as the use of such a tool at work - for work. There are lots of different software options, though, and it's hard to know which one to select. Enter a new report from Pistachio Consulting, topic area experts and providers of an excellent new report on the options.

Yes there are profitable, self-funded SaaS product companies out there. They're the ones we're celebrating in our Gritty Entrepreneur series. To that end, we recently interviewed Timothy Young, CEO of Socialcast, which is in the "enterprise social messaging" market - otherwise known as enterprise microblogging. The consumer champions are Twitter and FriendFeed. The best known enterprise play (at least known within the Blogosphere) is Yammer, a company we panned. Socialcast not only has a revenue model, it also has profits, so that seemed worth investigating.