We first launched Microblink in July of 2008 with the simple idea of documenting the excitement and news that was taking place in the growing medium of microblogging. Since then, the last six months have been amazing and we have received a lot of great feedback and encouragement. However, we knew there was more that we wanted to do with the site and some majors changes would have to be made to realize them.

Last week was the start of a few of those changes. On January 28, we pushed out our first major theme update to the Microblink website. Many of the changes were inspired by the desire to integrate better with the microblogging communities while others are focused on making it easier to find and read our articles.

While there were many changes to the site, here are a few of my favorite features:

An easier way to share our articles – URL shorteners like tinyurl and bit.ly have become commonplace to post a link on any microblogging service. We now save you the hassle of compressing links by creating shortened URLs to every post with our microblink.com/go links.

Better conversations in our comments – Microblogs are starting to move to threaded conversations so there was no reason that our blog shouldn’t be able to do the same. Now you can respond to specific comments in all of our articles.

Tracking comments in Twitter – Dan Zarrella first showed us the power of tracking comments in Twitter with Tweetbacks. We have taken his concept and added a bit more to it (thanks to our developer, Mark) by tracking our Twitter Comments in our sidebar under the Buzz section along with displaying your tweets in our article pages.

Become a featured user – Our site has grown from the support of the microblogging community and we wanted to create another way to highlight the users and developers that are contributing to the microblogging medium. If you are launching a new platform, service or application, or just want to promote your profile, advertise with us as a featured user.

Microblink continues to grow thanks to the passionate users in the microblogging space. There is always an abundance of things to write about and your support continues to drive us to improve our writing and our site.

Thank you for helping us get this far and look for more changes to come.