Having a meaningful conversation in 140 characters or less seems at times a tad, let's say, disjointed. It's not exactly meaningful. But it is this Twitter like approach that is defining how real-time technologies are deployed in the enterprise. AskMyBrainTrust looks at the real-time enterprise through a different scope. Users are not limited to a set number of characters for expressing themselves. Instead, the service uses a real-time model to elicit meaningful conversations with your brain trust, that inner circle you go to for counsel and feedback. Sponsor With most real-time services, the application provides better value when a critical mass of people participate. AskMyBrainTrust limits a group to seven people. Collaboration is limited only to the people in the group. After the group is formed, a topic is submitted. Idea are presented by members of the group. Each has its own threaded discussion. Members of the brain trust vote on the ideas with the intention of driving the group to a consensus. Real-time services with character limits make it challenging for meaningful communications across a tight group of confidants. Email is even worse. Discussions scatter. Gathering ideas together to form a consensus almost has to be done on a one-on-one basis. Conference calls can sometimes feel endless without any form of agreement. AskMyBrain represents the evolution of real-time technologies. Real-time services like Yammer and present.ly have their own fit for ongoing conversations with any number of people. AskMyBrainTrust is not suited for these kinds of social conversations. More so, it is a service for when you need to collaborate among a small group of people to reach a collective agreement. Discuss

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Conversations in 140 Characters or Less are not Exactly Meaningful

In late November, ReadWriteWeb asked the question, Wasabi beta . As of today the service will go live to the public with CEO Freddy Mini's presentation at the Le Web conference. Sponsor In addition to a number of magazine-style themes, some of the features designed for the real-time web include: Multipurpose Navigation : Users will enjoy the ability to read their feeds and insert widgets directly into the Wasabi home page Smart Reader : In addition to delivering users' RSS feeds, Netvibes Smart Reader lets users check their Twitter, Facebook, widget apps, notifications, podcast subscriptions, photos and notifications. The Real-Time RSS: As promised, Netvibes' feed delivery engine updates with full PubSubHubBub support. Publishing : In addition to being able to create more than 185,000 widgets, users can take advantage of the site's no-code push publishing and notification tools as well as free hosting. The company's premium product also allows users to monitor real-time brand conversations. Drag and Follow Widgets : Facebook, Twitter and MySpace widgets allow users to drag hashtags or usernames out of existing widgets in order to instantly create new specialized ones. To test the product visit netvibes.com . Discuss

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Netvibes Launches Ultimate News and Lifestyle Dashboard

My6sense just anounced a new version of its iPhone application that can automatically highlight the most relevant tweets from the users you follow. The mytweetsense feature learns from the user's implicit and explicit actions and builds a model of what is interesting to the individual user. Mytweetsense works best for tweets that include links. The app's features are clearly geared towards these kind of tweets and include previews for links, videos and images. Sponsor The default view in the app displays all the recent tweets you received according to relevancy. You can also switch to a chronological view of your timeline and the app allows users to easily reshare content on Twitter, Facebook and Friendfeed, as well as by email. Finding Relevant Tweets The app trains itself. My6sense just watches what links you click on and which articles you retweet or share on other social networks. It takes a little bit of training, but if our experience with the my6sense RSS reader is any indication, the results are surprisingly good. We got a chance to talk to Barak Hachamov, the company's founder and CEO at LeWeb earlier today. According to Hachamov, my6sense creates an extremely detailed personal profile of every user. It's important to note that mytweetsense mostly looks at the content of the links that you receive in your Twitter stream. While the app has an option to turn on the relevancy algorithm for tweets without links, the service works best when it can work with the additional information that is implicit in these links. Twitter lists and smarter real-time search engines have made it easier to keep up with the constant stream of updates on Twitter, but this is still a random stream of information. My6sense's iPhone app may not replace your favorite Twitter app right now, but it's a great tool to catch up on your tweets if you have been offline for a few days. You do, however, have to use it for a few days before you can get the best experience. The app first has to get to know you, after all. Discuss

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Finding Tweets that Matter to You: My6sense Launches New iPhone App

At LeWeb today, Ryan Sarver, Twitter's Director of Platform, took the state during the morning session. He stressed that Twitter needs the developer ecosystem if it wants to continue to grow. Sarver also announced that Twitter will give all developers access to the full firehose feed in early 2010. In addition, Twitter will also soon launch a new developer site, increase the rate limit for services that use OAuth and launch a new API for browser-less apps. Sponsor Walking through the history of Twitter, Sarver noted that the core value of Twitter is openness. The first Twitter application was written in January 2007. There are now over 50,000 application in Twitter's ecosystem. This, Sarver notes, shows how developers can use simple APIs to create rich experiences. Sarver also noted that 50% of the company's traffic now happens on partner sites and through applications. For Twitter, according to Sarver, it's all about growing the market and building out the ecosystem. Throughout the keynote, Sarver stressed that Twitter can only be as successful as long as its developers are successful. Sarver pointed out 3 companies that have manged to monetize Twitter: CoTweet , OneRiot and TweetMeme. Coming Up: More Transparency, Improved Communication and a Business Model Going forward, Twitter wants to offer even better tools for third-party developers in its ecosystem. Twitter wants to be more transparent with its developers and improve its communication. In addition, the company wants to improve the utility of its API. Twitter also plans to announce a business model that allows it to share in the success of its partners. Everybody Gets Access to the Firehose Most importantly, Twitter is opening up the firehose of tweets to all developers. Sarver didn't announce any details, but this is obviously a very important move as it will give more developers the ability to build applications that need real-time access to every tweet without having to get Twitter's permission. Soon, developers who use OAuth will be able to ping Twitter more often than services that still use Twitter's old authentication mechanism. Twitter will soon deprecate its old non-OAuth authentication mechanisms. In addition, Twitter will launch an API for browser-less apps. Twitter also plans to launch a new developers site to educate its developers and will soon host its first developers conference. Image credit: @scobleizer . Discuss

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Twitter: All Developers Will Get Access to the Firehose in Early 2010

Dell Computers announced today that it has now sold more than $6.5 million in product through links broadcast out to its Twitter followers. The company has more than 1 million followers on Twitter, a handy gift from Twitter Inc. via prominent placement of Dell on the Suggested Users List shown to all new Twitter users. The news will no doubt be celebrated by social media marketers all the world over but I believe there's reason to be very skeptical of this tidbit of information. Sponsor Specifically, such celebration of sales through social media broadcast is unrealistic for most firms, it's overstated in Dell's case (if all $6.5m was made in one year that would mean 1 million people opted-in to get these ads and only delivered .015% of the company's annual revenue) and most importantly: such seductive facts detract from the real, much larger value of social media. That's listening. We offer below our article written in June, when Dell was heralding the number $3m. Much of the research is based on interviews we did for our ReadWriteWeb Guide to Online Community Management . Social Media ROI: Dell's $3m on Twitter and Four Better Examples Dell Computers announced last night that it has surpassed $3 million in sales via links from one of its Twitter accounts, making one of the most high profile examples of social media Return on Investment (ROI) all the more juicy. Telling your reluctant boss that social media is worth using because Dell made $3 million on Twitter, however, runs the risk of encouraging e-commerce broadcast as the model for engagement in conversation. Other, more conversational, examples of ROI make important additions to c The @DellOutlet account has more than 600k followers on Twitter and frequently posts links to discounted computer hardware. Revenue from those links is great to be able to point to, but there is a risk of reinforcing traditional business thinking where it is not fully appropriate. New media is a new world and while the ultimate bottom line is important, many participants argue that the greatest benefits of engagement do not draw a straight line to the cash register. Building a strong community of customer advocates, listening to community concerns and discovering new business and product developement opportunities are softer benefits of social media engagement that skeptics often don't see when they presume that old-school methods of pushing calls to buy is what should be done on these new channels. Hard and soft ROI are matters we focused on extensively in the ReadWriteWeb Guide to Online Community Management , our first premium report for businesses. Dell itself does a lot of listening and conversation from this same Twitter account. The public benefits of that conversation have been all but lost now that Twitter has changed its policies regarding the visibility of public @replies . Dell followers no longer see public replies sent to other followers they themselves aren't following. That's a major lost opportunity for public education and good will. As Pandora community manager, Lucia Willow, told us in an interview for the Guide: "I intentionally respond to most customer service messages with private direct messages. If it's a question that a lot of people have, then I answer back publicly with an @ message." Shhh...those public conversations are now invisible, for Pandora, for Dell and for all the rest of us. Though Dell reports good results from Twitter over the last two years, changed policies over the last two months may require a change in the way the company uses Twitter if it wants to keep seeing those kinds of results. Four Better Examples of Social Media ROI That Dell has made $3m from Twitter links is cool, and it's a good arrow to have in your social media advocacy quiver, but here are a number of examples we think better capture both the bottom line and some of the soft benefits of conversation. Joe Cothrel, Chief Community Officer at enterprise online community vendor Lithium , gathered these numbers in 2007 and we included them among other resources in the RWW Community Management Guide. These examples reference older related forms of online social interaction, but they also concern far greater sums of money than $3m. A Cisco study in 2004 found that 43% of visits to online support forum are in lieu of opening up a support case through standard methods. Cost per interaction in customer support averages $12 via the contact center versus $0.25 via self-service options. (Forrester, 2006) Jupiter Research (now Forrester) reported in 2006 that customers report good experiences in forums more than twice as often as they do via calls or mail. Ebay found in 2006 that participants in online communities spend 54% more than non-community users. Better customer experiences, far lower support costs and more buying activity in the long run. Those are observations that can help provide context to the high-profile example of Dell pushing e-commerce links out over Twitter. Dell is clearly doing a lot of the same kind of customer service via social media that the companies above cite, but watch out for falling into the trap of telling your reluctant boss that Twitter is important because Dell bagged $3 million there. Interested in learning more best practices for online community? Check out the ReadWriteWeb Guide to Online Community Management . Thanks to Ben Parr for sharing the Dell Community announcement link. Discuss

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Don't Tell Your Boss: Dell Made $6.5m on Twitter

Google unveiled its real-time search interface today and it looks much, much better than what rivals Yahoo and Bing have done so far. The new Google real-time search functionality will appear on selected search results pages, below News results, above or below top ranking natural search results - sometimes just above the fold of the page. The new type of results are well-integrated, unobtrusive, diverse in contents and formatted simply. It appears to be a job very well done. It's hard to believe that neither Yahoo nor Bing have created an experience anywhere near as compelling. Sponsor Bing is a Bummer Bing's "real-time search" comes in the form of a special page for Twitter results . On that page you see a tag cloud of popular terms on Twitter, links shared regarding those terms and a few recent tweets in which each link appeared. It's not very visually appealing. In fact, it's downright ugly. It's also not integrated extensively into the main Bing site. Search results on Bing come only from Twitter and links share on Twitter. There are a lot of low-value retweets displayed. Twitter is of course just a small part of the real-time web. Yahoo is MIA Yahoo! on the other hand, displays Twitter as a tab in a select few news search results pages. That tab offers links being shared on Twitter, not tweets themselves. It's very hard to find a search result that uses Twitter results, though, on Yahoo! Google Is The Winner So Far Google's implementation, at least in this demonstration, brings real-time search front and center, displays commentary from Tweets, links being shared through a variety of channels and will soon display messages from MySpace and Facebook. It's broader, the User Experience is better and it's more prominent. Are There Still Alternatives? There are countless real-time search engines that have to be disappointed to see Google going its own way instead of acquiring a real-time search startup, and its unclear how many of those services still offer something unique that Google hasn't now captured in this announcement. Aardvark is one and its now reported that Google is looking to buy that company. We'll still await the full public roll-out of Google's real-time search, its integration with the company's new Social Search, with localization and personalization. So far it looks like Google has done what neither Yahoo! nor Bing have, though - create a compelling, serious real-time search experience. Discuss

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Google is Beating Bing & Yahoo Again, Now In Real-Time Search

At this year's LeWeb conference, Pearltrees will launch the beta version of it's bookmarking and curation service. In this beta, Pearltrees will introduce some interesting features for Twitter users. Starting Wednesday, Pearltrees users will be able to connect their Twitter accounts to the service. Pearltrees will continuously scan your Twitter account and index every link you share on Twitter. Currently, shared links on Twitter are often quickly forgotten, but thanks to the new Pearltrees connection, you will be able to easily create an archive of all the links you have shared with your friends. Sponsor We got a chance to discuss Pearltrees and its upcoming launch with the company's CEO Patrice Lamothe in the startup's Paris offices today. According to Lamothe, the average Pearltrees user already spends about 12 minutes per day on the site. According to Lamothe, the company's mission it to give users the option to curate anything on the Web and make it easy to archive all the links and content you share online. You can find our in-depth review of PearlTrees here . Thanks to the new Twitter feature, which will put all of the links you share on Twitter into a drop box on Pearltrees, you can now easily create a complete archive of all the content you share. You still have to organize this content yourself, however. Pearltrees does not feature auto-tagging. Also Coming This Week: Real-Time Updates Starting on Wednesday, Pearltrees will not just allow you to import links from Twitter, but the service will also be able to send out alerts to your Twitter friends when you update your own pearls. In addition, the company will also introduce a new search feature and updates from other users you follow will be updated in real time. It's important to note that Pearltrees' focus is less on following other users. Instead, Lamothe stressed, the real value of the service is in following the content that others users create on the service. API Coming Soon Early next year, the company will introduce an API that will allow developers to access bookmarks and import and export data from other services. The details of this API are still in flux, but will likely allow developers to easily connect other social networks to the service as well. Discuss

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Pearltrees Beta Launches on Wednesday: Will Let You Archive the Links You Share on Twitter