ReadWriteWeb

When we first looked at Spredfast, the social campaign management tool launched today by Austin, Texas-based Social Agency, we thought it looked like a less-flashy version of TweetDeck. Our first question to co-founders Kenneth Cho and Scott McCaskill was actually how the two programs differed and they took it in stride, given how far off the question really was. With big names like IBM, AOL, Cisco, Intel and Porter Novelli using the service, you better bet it does more than manage a handful of social networking accounts and microblogging services.

Spredfast wants to be a new player in the field of social campaign management, and it is set to compete with other big names like Objective Marketer and Radian6.

Earlier this week, we told you about the thriving startup scene in Austin, TX, which is home to South By Southwest (SXSW), one of the largest events of the year for the startup community. Many startups have used the Interactive portion of SXSW to launch their new product, including Twitter and Foursquare, and now the organizers of the event are offering special package for companies that can help with that process.

Announced yesterday, The aptly named "Launch Package" provides companies with floor space at March's Film and Interactive Trade Show, as well as advertisements in the event program, inclusion at an invite-only press event, and the opportunity to get their "creative swag" in gift bags to be distributed at the event.

Though we have previously warned startups to tread carefully when building their businesses on third party APIs, there are still plenty of successful businesses that rely on them for their day-to-day operation. For application developers, if you've found yourself repeatedly visiting Downforeveryoneorjustme.com to check on the status of a site or API, one company may just have the perfect solution.

A product of Dutch website monitoring service WatchMouse, API-status is an easily-interpreted heads-up display of 26 popular third party APIs. The big boys like Facebook, Twitter and Flickr are all present and accounted for, and other services like Salesforce, and Posterous are supported also.

Seesmic just announced the launch of Seesmic Look at an event in New York City. Seesmic Look, which is a Windows-only product, is anything but your standard Twitter client. Seesmic Looks is targeted at mainstream users who would normally be intimidated by the complexity of standard Twitter clients like Seesmic or TweetDeck.

At the annual Salesforce user conference this year, DreamForce '09, the buzz was about its ability to merge people's streams, Twitter for example, into their CRM solution.

A new question for the industry emerges: Will the Salesforce cloud reach consumers on on their own timeline, or instead will social media own the stream and connect to the company directly?

As we reported last week, groups of hackers from all around the world got together this weekend to find ways to help Haiti and to create tools that can be used in future disasters. One of these groups, in collaboration with Project EPIC, developed a new syntax to make it easier for computers to read tweets from areas that are affected by a disaster. If adopted widely, this new hashtag-based syntax will make it easier to automatically extract data about locations or the status of a road or person.

A third of all Internet users in the U.S. now post status updates on social networking services like Twitter and Facebook at least once per week. According to new data from Forrester Research, more than half of what the report calls "conversationalists" are female and 70% are 30 years old or older. Forrester's data also shows that 59% of all U.S. Internet users now use social networks and that 70% consume content on social media and social networking sites.

After news about the landing of US Airways 1549 in the Hudson first broke on Twitter in January 2009, the microblogging service quickly captured the imagination of a new group of potential users. Throughout the first months of 2009, Twitter grew at a rapid pace, peaking at a growth rate of 13% in March 2009.

Now, however, according to the latest data from HubSpot, Twitter's growth is slowing dramatically. In October 2009, Twitter's growth rate had fallen to 3.5%. On a positive note, though, the average active user on Twitter today is more engaged than six months ago.

If you're hoping to go to Twitter's first-ever developers conference, Chirp, you might like to know when it's scheduled for, right? Twitter hasn't publicly announced the date, but we wanted to know so that we didn't schedule our next public event on the same date. So I just asked on Quora, the new Q&A service just launched by Facebook's first CTO, Adam D'Angelo.

Within a few hours I got an answer, from Ashton Kutcher, the most-followed person in the world on Twitter. Ashton says the event is going to happen on April 14. So our event will not be on April 14.

In its heyday, ICQ was one of the most popular instant messaging networks. Today, you will probably have a hard time finding your friends on ICQ. Nevertheless, almost two year after the release of ICQ 6, ICQ just released a new version of its IM client. ICQ 7 now integrates updates from Twitter, Facebook, Digg, Delicious, Flickr and YouTube. ICQ plans to add support for more social networks in the near future.

ICQ 7 is only available for Windows. Mac users can rest assured that they are not missing out on much.

Amid rumors and artifacts of Twitter's testing accounts managed by multiple users, we've found a startup focusing on precisely that problem.

The biggest and perhaps best known competitor in this space is CoTweet, a truly enterprise-scalable solution for Twitter accounts with multiple users.
It's well-suited to brands or news organizations in particular, but BirdHerd might provide a low-cost alternative for small- to medium-sized businesses or other groups.

A month ago, Adam Duffy and Sean McCullough were diligently preparing for the acquisition of their Tulsa Oklahoma-based company Ping.fm. ReadWriteWeb covered the Seesmic deal in early January and since then the duo has moved to San Francisco to help get their product inline with the twitter client. ReadWriteWeb caught up with McCullough to find out what's changed since the acquisition and what early-stage entrepreneurs can learn.

In an effort to add one more story to the list of reasons why Facebook already rules the world and can stop trying, we find that Facebook is the social-network-login of choice by nearly 2-to-1.

Widget provider Gigya sent us some numbers from their social network login tool and in a three company competition, Facebook came away with 65% of the traffic, Myspace with 18% and Twitter with 17%.

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.

While Twitter's growth has slowed down in recent months, new data shows that the popular microblogging service has found a lot of new users outside of the United States. According to new data from social media analytics and monitoring firm Sysomos, the U.S. now accounts for about 50% of all active Twitter users. This is down sharply from 62% in June 2009. The share of Twitter users from Brazil, Indonesia and Germany, however, has grown significantly over the last six months.

Since Google Wave's launch, we've seen a slew of real-time, short-form collaboration tools.

From massively multiplayer Q&A app Quora to invite-only, group-scrapbooking tool TwitAlbums to developer-centric, code-coaching resource Squad, the web is rife with sites focused on making groups more communicative and more efficient. Teambox has popped up on our radar as "a Twitter-like project collaboration tool," and it fits right in with this trend.

As some of our readers know, I was clumsy enough to hack off a chunk of my finger while making dinner a couple nights ago. This incident has severely curtailed my blogging activity, but it's led to a fortunate inspiration, as well!

For those of you who are differently-abled - temporarily or otherwise - or for those of you who are simply too lazy to type, here are a handful of resources for hands-free Internet use, from blog posting to Twitter updates to straight-up voice-to-text transcription services. I hope you find these apps as useful as I have.

Presentation company Slideshare recently released its list of "5 Social Media Secrets for 2010". While these secrets certainly sound like great suggestions, we thought we'd connect them to some concrete tactics and resources that you can use to improve your social media strategy.

When we talk to our less technologically-inclined friends about Twitter, we often run across the objection that they really don't care what so-and-so ate for lunch today or what movie they are seeing tonight. And every time, we try to extol all the other benefits of the world's most popular microblogging service. But could we be wrong? Is Twitter mostly people talking about themselves and what they ate for lunch?

Well, SemanticHacker, the blog of contextual ad platform Textwise, has crunched some numbers and we may have to eat our hat.

In 2007, Wired Magazine published an article entitled the See-Through CEO where Redfin founder Glenn Kelman gained the public's sympathy and a slew of new members by blogging his corporate woes. Lately we've been looking inward at how companies can improve their employee recruitment strategy through social media. Great candidates research you before accepting an offer, and here is what your social media profile reveals to them.