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.

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.

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.

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.

Quite some years ago, after attending a presentation about lean production at Toyota, I decided to buy the book “The Toyota Way”. I had the feeling many of their 14 management principles would be applicable to professional services as well. I started reading the book, but never finished. Last weeks I read several posts about lean software development compared to another Agile working method: SCRUM. Honestly, despite the recent car issues that Toyota is facing, I feel both methods, or even a combination of these two, can help us deliver software in a better way.

Are you one of those early birds who installed the then free available Windows 7 Release Candidate? Fun is over. Beginning March 1, the Windows 7 Release Candidate (RC) will start to shut down every two hours in preparation for its expiration on June 1, 2010. That means you will need to migrate your RC systems to an official version of Windows 7. Another option is to go back to yuor your previous operating system. But who’s willing to do that?

Most of us will remember a rather dramatic introduction of Windows Vista several years ago. With a lot of marketing power users were forced to switch to a not very well performing new operating system. There were many complaints about the big amount of bugs and the poor performance. Microsoft seemed to ignore the complaints, but after a while they had to conclude Windows Vista was not the right way to go. Quite soon after the Vista introduction it became clear Microsoft was aiming to launch a new OS. Windows 7 should make us forget about the Vista debacle and should be able to compete with the very user friendly Apple OSX. New data shows Microsoft has learned from the past mistakes.

YouTube was among the first big brands which decided to stop supporting Internet Explorer 6 and today Google joined the IE6 ban. Like many others Google is using more and more Javascript technology to realize Rich Internet Applications (RIA). The main issue is that JavaScript is not supported in the same way by different browsers and especially preparing a working Internet application for IE6 is a time consuming trial and error challenge.