HootSuite, my favourite social media client, just announced new premium packages designed for business and organizations. Fortunately, they also continu to provide a free version for most customers. But is that free version sufficient for us?

Tweetboard is the new kid on the social media block. This new tool, released just some days ago, promises to stimulate social media interaction among the visitors of a single website or blog. These visitors are supposed to have a similar interest in common, so why not enabling them to interact? The proof of the pudding is still in the eating and that’s why we installed it on our blog as well. Just click the tiny Twitter label at the left to see the full screen. The video below tells the rest of the story.

How to profit from the new Ehcache Annotations for Spring? As a Java developer you would like to know, don’t you? ehcache-spring-annotations – licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 – is a project that simplifies caching in Spring based application using popular Ehcache library. Version 1.1.2 of ehcache-spring-annotations has been released only recently. In this article I will present how to create a web project that benefits from ehcache-spring-annotations

When following us for a longer time you won’t be surprised we at Goyello love coffee, good code, geek tools and social media. Especially in Europe we are still facing an intensive debate about the (non-)sense of social media. Honestly, it feels similar to discussions we had just some years ago about the Internet and e-mail. For a long period of time companies tried to ban this from the workfloor. Without real success as we know today. Today social media seem to be the new victim. Companies try again to ban them from the workfloor. It seems we didn’t learn from the past. In this post I present three movies that show what’s going on. These movies are mainly based on US data, but they show a trend that is coming to Europe quickly, if it didn’t arrive yet.

More and more companies understand the need to be present at social media but not many of them do social media properly and effectively. Why? Because in order to succeed in social media we can no longer treat it as yet another communication channel. It can’t be a random activity. It should be aligned with the overall strategy. Many companies take up SM but have no idea what for and what they will do there. Then it’s like “teen sex” - Everyone wants to do it. No one actually knows how. When finally done, there is surprise it’s not better.”

Today my HootSuite client was offline for a while, which was a big surprise. In general Hootsuite is a very reliable service. Fortunately, I was informed this was due to a remarkable update. Some time late I noticed significant changes to the social media dashboard beginning with a completely refreshed HTML5 user interface, plus geo-located search, native Twitter ReTweets, and integrated Google Analytics.

For me Hootsuite was already the best Social Media dashboard for both personal and team based social media management. Today’s improvements prove Hootsuite continuously keeps improving its service.

On daily basis we use Eclipse as a primary IDE for developing Java applications. We also are tightly coupled with Apache Maven as our main project management tool. A well known plugin that integrates Apache Maven into Eclipse is m2eclipse. One of its main features is the integration with Web Tools Project (WTP). In this short tutorial I will present how to start and configure Java Web Application using m2eclipse .

Two weeks ago Facebook launched a new social plugin (”like” button) that works with the Open Graph protocol as part of the strategy to make the Web more social and personalized. The button spreads across the internet and it’s clear that websites’ owners quickly embraced the new social plugin.

There is already a lot of controversy around the plugin. Some people wonder how it will influence the privacy on the net? Many people feel Facebook will soon dominate most of our online experience. Some don’t like that FB is selling user’s private information to marketing companies. Will it affect Twitter or Digg? How will it change advertising and marketing strategies? Time will tell.

When you open your LinkedIn page to update your status, you will notice a new feature. From today LinkedIn enabled easy sharing of news and links. A nice new feature which enables you to share what’s hot in your domain. It’s easy to share the news with your network. LinkedIn is step by step becoming more social.

Social networks are an important place to meet for marketers and increasingly for politicians as well. The 2008 Obama campaign on Twitter showed the value of social networks. Voters are online 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. High time to meet your voters online! Today at the Politics Online Conference TownHall is officially going to be announced. Microsoft TownHall is an online tool that fosters, organizes, moderates, and houses online conversations, driving rich discussion around top issues and concerns. It is a place to ask, answer, and prioritize questions that are top of mind. The most popular or relevant questions bubble to the top, so participants can readily see timely topics at any given moment.