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Today Sprout Social has come out with v2 of their social media management service. It adds personalized dashboards, multi-user account management, an iPhone app, and dozens of other features. We covered their launch last year here.

As new firms enter the Web-based help desk services arena, we are seeing a blurring of lines between the traditional service desk products and the breed of public online Q&A types of services. Particularly as these tools adopt connections to social media, it is getting harder to tell whether these are two separate categories anymore, as IT becomes consumerized and as self-service style apps become more popular and capable.

Zendesk is a hosted help desk solution we've covered many times at ReadWriteWeb. Although Zendesk has served big companies like Adobe and Sony Music, it's better known as the help desk provider for sexy startups like Twitter. It's hoping to change that today with the announcement of an enterprise plan that will better serve larger organizations by providing unlimited internal usage, multi-brand help desks and more.

Assistly, a social CRM and help desk software-as-a-service, announced version 2.0 of its product this week, including a new freemium pricing model. Your first Assistly user is now free, with no limitations. It costs $1 an hour for additional part-time agents or $49 a month for each full-time agent with unlimited usage.

Besides the pricing change, Assistly's admin panel and reporting features got a facelift.

Atlassian, New Relic, OTRS, Pivotal Labs, Service Now, SugarCRM, and Zendesk have agreed to support a common JSON API specification for customer service applications called NetworkedHelpDesk.org.

The idea is to make it possible for all applications related to a customer's experience to talk to each other, from help desk to bug tracking to project management. "Where things start to fall through the cracks is when customer service has to cross organization boundaries," says Zendesk COO Zack Urlocker. "Either within the organization, like customer service to engineering, or outside of the organization like to a component vendor."

You probably won't want to replace all your call center PCs with iPads, and doing "real" support work likely requires a full keyboard. But we're betting at least a few of your customer support staff have to either take work home with them or monitor issues outside of the office. Accessing the customer service help desk from the road probably isn't a good justification for buying an iPad, unless you have a lot of reps in the field using help desk software. But help desk access is a good use for iPads that your company or your employees already won.

The help desk for the iPad market seems to be just getting started. Here's a look at what's available so far.

Chatting with your customers live as they navigate your site can be pretty powerful, but how can you be sure that whatever they tell you is acted upon?

A new integration between customer chat service Olark and help desk software provider Zendesk makes this process a bit easier.

Plenty of people have tried to make customer service "fun." If you've ever worked a customer service job, you may have seen a FISH! Training Video. But chances are a video about a bunch of happy-go-lucky fish throwers somewhere in Seattle didn't make working the swing shift at a call center for minimum wage any better. (Apparently, those videos don't make the people who actually work at that fish stand very happy either.)

This week UserVoice, the idea management/customer feedback software-as-service we've raved about, announced that it's getting into the hosted help desk business. And UserVoice hopes to make customer service fun by adding game mechanics to the help desk. The target audience is different - UserVoice is targeting application support teams, not contact centers - but the idea is the same: to make customer service fun.

Earlier this week, thanks to the iPad, Apple overtook HP as the biggest vendor of mobile computers. Challenging HP, one of the largest vendors of both consumer and enterprise technology, is quite a feat. Expect this trend to continue. Recent surveys show increasing support for tablets in the enterprise, and more vendors are releasing iPad apps for business users. Here's a look at some of this week's data and new apps.

Customer support software-as-a-service Zendesk released an iPad app today, aimed at helping customer support agents to help customers while on the go.

Zendesk offers a Web-based help desk and support ticketing application, making it easier for companies to manage support requests from their customers. The new iPad app joins the company's other mobile apps (for iPhone, Android, and Blackberry), but undoubtedly responding to tickets is far easier on the iPad.