Software Tribes is a newly launched social network that allows software engineers to collaborate with each other through a Twitter-like interface by posting an update, i.e. “What’s up?”

Currently in public beta, which mean software professionals can register an account with a professional purpose. Since Software Tribes is dubbed as a micro-blogging network for software professionals, therefore provided a place that enable this niche group of software professionals to meetup with each other, find projects, share knowledge and also join the groups in their area of interests or specialties. In the meantime, there are many groups be created, but the top group TIBCO, created for the discussion of TIBCO Software Inc., a company that specialize in helping companies achieve service-oriented architecture (SOA) and business process management (BPM) success apparently has only less than 20 members.

On the public timeline of Software Tribes, there aren’t many users engage in the threaded conversations as the number of active users on Software Tribes is still relatively small. For the time being, most of the users are based in India as the creator is from Hyderabad, India as well. However, it would be interested to come back to this new micro blogging service and check the growth rate of its user base when it slowly expand to other countries.

So you’re a Twitter user. And you love to save money when you’re shopping online. Perhaps a new Twitter app called TwitSavings can save you hours of time for scouring the Web to find the promotional code, best deals, and etc.

In fact, TwitSavings is not a best deal search engine, but a Twitter app that aggregating all the best deals, coupons, or bargains from the tweets around Twitter, and lets tweeters to determine whether the deals are actually work by clicking the “bank” button, or selecting the options of the “break” button such as “Not a coupon,” “Invalid/Expired,” “Duplicate,” and “Spam.”

My own take is considering there are a handful of Web sites also help to let you find the best deals on the Web, TwitSavings really can’t provide any differentiating advantage. However, TwitSavings takes a different approach by focusing on the tweets and since Twitter generally break the news faster than any other platform, you might find it being more productive in this aspect.

A new Twitter tool called Followformation is launched this week. With this service, it will let you follow the tweets from the top people in the respective category that you’re interested with. As the motto of Followformation suggests, “Make following make sense,” Followformation has attracted a pretty large group of users as there are over 14,000+ follows are made through this decent tool on the launch day, as stated on its Tumblr blog.

At first glance, I still not very sure whether this newly launched tool is able to gain the traction, when there are several other tools are offering the same help in tracking the right tweeters to follow for us, such as WeFollow, Tweetsourcer, and etc. Quite the contrary; the stats showed on its blog has somehow clear my doubts.

From what I can see, Followformation is a tool too good for the novice tweeters. Since a new user joined Twitter, to get some benefits out of Twitter is to join the conversation. But before one can take part in the conversation, the only way is to start following someone, and Followformation can help you to do that right out from the gate, though it still didn’t have any differentiating factor from other tweet following tools out there on the Web.

Apparently, the popular micro-blogging platform Twitter is lack of a sort of scheduler that allowed its users to schedule the tweets. Perhaps the tweeters don’t need a scheduler, as opposed to the post scheduling feature that had long been established as a standard in most of the blogging platforms such as WordPress or TypePad, as Twitter’s main use is about posting tweets about “What are you doing?”, instead of “What will you do?”

However, there’s still a need in the Twitterverse for this kind of tweet scheduling feature and Twuffer has came into the limelight. Twuffer is a newly launched service that allow users to schedule their tweets. On the Twuffer site, Twitter users simply need to enter their credentials, and start to use the tweet scheduling tools found on the dashboard.

If you’re a Twitter user, you can type your tweet, and beneath the tweet type box, you can schedule the tweet for a time in the future by choosing the date, month and year as well as a specific time in a pull-down box in the “When to tweet” column. After you finish scheduled the tweet, simply click on the “set status!” button, and it’s all done. And all the scheduled tweets will be shown on the queued tweets page. Meanwhile, any queued tweet that sent will be appeared on sent tweets page. However, for the scheduled tweet, you either can delete it or re-type a new tweet if you find the schedule time was wrong, as you are not allowed to re-schedule the tweet for the second time.

Overall, Twuffer is especially useful for the tweeters who are frequently tweet announcements, reminders, or to create an illusion that they never sleep and working 24X7 on the Web.

Tweetrush is an analytics product that launched in this year. Its existence is served as a tool for a much larger and full-scaled analytics product called Rush Hour. With Tweetrush, it lets you analyze the total tweets happened in Twitterverse everyday over a period of one (1) week, your own tweets, as well as the hourly average of tweets at all time.

It is not surprise that the popularity of Twitter is attributed to its micro-blogging features. Many users used it for the intent of sending notifications to their followers, and you know, probably by next month November 13, according to this little Twitter tool called GigaTweet, Twitter will reach a new milestone of a billion tweets to be posted by all the Tweeters.

However, it amazes me that in reality not all the tweets are considered as the genuine messages equating with something about “What are you doing?” and it even not coming close to the notifications, in a situation where a Tweeter can use it as an IM tool to notify her followers what is happening in some city street, and one can keep herself in a better position to the conversations. Many Twitter messages are posted from the Internet bots, these bots are just keep on sending messages which is automated in the back-end to the Twitterverse.

With Tweetrush, now we can prove it that the growing amount of messages occurring in everyday from these spammy and commercial accounts. Imagine everyday all these accounts have the capability to post the average 600 to over 700 hundred messages a day, while we only have 1,440 minutes per day, and these accounts will likely to post a message in every two (2) minutes, the spam messages seemed to be out of control now. While I checking the top tweeters listed in Tweetrush one by one, their accounts are simply nothing but full of spam or marketing messages, advertising and links dumped.

The other day I came across a new micro blogging tool that designed purposely for the use of classroom. It is called Edmodo which is specifically launched in the early of this September, and trying to make explicit the important aspects of the communication between teachers and students.

Since it is served as a tool that facilitate and improve the communication as well as process of teaching between teachers and students, you probably aware that it is an usual practice that teacher chose to create the group and material for study and then left to the students the responsibility for joining the aforesaid group. Assume that you’re a teacher, the moment you sign in and create a group, you can use the special code of the group you created and send it to your students. Students then join the group using the code you’ve given out and start to fill-up her own personal information.

In fact, I’ve acted as a student and join one the groups available on Edmodo. It’s a bit look like a WebCT/Blackboard (except that you won’t find the University logo), whereas a student, you can find the study resources for a particular course, albeit that the main founding purpose of Edmodo is always emphasizing on micro blogging, i.e. the Twitter effect particularly. For the student’s Edmodo page, it is a three (3) columns page where students can find her avatar, locker (for files saving purpose), groups she joined in the let-hand sidebar. The main column, i.e. the column stands in the middle is the classroom timeline, all the relevant updates pertaining to the group including posts and replies are listed there. Also, there is box for students to post a note, share an URL link, or attach a file. But teachers will have an extra option to post alert, assignment, and event. In the right-hand panel, all the recent alerts, assignments, or events can be found there. In addition, students can set a special setting if they’d like to receive the email notifications whenever there are new alerts, notes, files, etc. posted on the Edmodo platform.

Edmodo is known as the Twitter for the classroom. This is largely attributed to its strong favoritism of the micro blogging feature in its platform which allowed students or the teachers to “post” the latest updates along the classroom courses progress. The platform’s choice of micro blogging design stemmed, in most part, I think, from the worldwide success of Twitter. As I am a Program Coordinator for the Postgraduate programs such as MBA and Doctorate program in the past, could this Edmodo helped solve the most difficult pegagogical problems a course faced, it’s still very early for me to comment on it. However, it certainly help to provide a platform for keeping the students talking when there are case discussion on the run.

To know more about how Edmodo is actually work, you can also watch a video clip that I’ve embedded in the below.