Announced via a shout 60 minutes ago, Rejaw is official shutting down on May 31, 2009.

Rejaw has stopped accepting new sign-ups effective immediately. From now until May 15th, you can continue to send new shouts, whispers, and replies, as well as request export of your private user data at http://rejaw.com/account/export

Rejaw is the third microblogging platform to shut down in the past year, following the footsteps of both Pownce and Jaiku. While Pownce and its staff were assimilated into Six Apart and Jaiku was essentially released back into the wild by Google, the Rejaw team is simply shutting down.

Being Different Wasn’t Enough

What is most disappointing about the announcement is that Rejaw was actually doing things differently than other microblogging platforms. They actually went against the 140 character rule, allowing people to post as much as they wanted. Other features included groups, auto-refreshing pages, email notification of replies plus their own official applications.

Unlike Twitter, which has depended on third-party developers to create clients for it’s service, Rejaw built its own desktop app (for both Mac and Windows) and an iPhone app.

No Traffic, Mo Problems

No official cause was cited for the shutdown, but its likely related to funding and/or traffic. While Twitter has just begun experimenting with various revenue generating streams, they’re sitting on heaps of cash from multiple funding rounds. Other platforms have not been so fortunate. Rejaw has been free to use since its inception and the team never hinted at sources of income for the platform.

According to Compete, traffic to the website actually increased over the previous month by 74.08%, moving from 10,054 unique visitors in February to 17,502 unique visitors in March. However, Rejaw launched in August 2008 with 53,345 unique visitors and was never able to post a month at even half that much traffic in each month since.

Time to Export Your Data Again

Just like you probably did with Pownce, now is the time to export your data from Rejaw. Head over to your export settings and submit your details to get an XML output.

Your XML file will include:

• shouts in your inbox including replies
• whispers in your inbox including replies
• people you are following
• people who are following you
• rooms you belong to including the list of owners and members
• your profile

The ironic part of this shutdown notice is that Rejaw was one of the first to build an import utility for Pownce, and was described as the best place to import your Pownce notes by Rahsheen Porter (@rahsheen).

Let us know how you feel about the platform shutting down in the comments.

Where will you move next?

This week a number of bloggers picked up Kara Swisher’s visit to Twitter HQ. On the AllThingsD blog she posted a nice interview of two of the co-founders, Evan Williams and Biz Stone. In a nutshell the interview was more of the same. We know from many interviews Twitter is a small company, they have no announced plans for a business model and continue to be operating in a state of managing stability and research.

I listened to the interview a couple of times, but this quote from Biz Stone continues to stick with me, “The idea of recognizing the difference between profit and value, and defining value…for us, value is making a great service, making a great user experience, putting out a good network, a robust network worldwide, and focusing on features and feature development, those types of things. That’s value for us. And profit will come later, when those things are achieved.” (Quote credit: Cnet’s Webware blog).

What kills me about this quote is that up until the very recent interface changes I have no idea what features they have been developing. The whole concept of Twitter adding value to Twitter is nonsense. The company is in its fourth year and it is still very much the same.

I don’t mean to discredit Twitter and their work, as they have found something remarkable. Every blog and media outlet can’t stop talking about Twitter. Oprah is even rumored to start tweeting today so there is no doubt that they have something. I just ask that Twitter keeps things in perspective.

Their innovations, features and use cases are coming from the community; not from a small team of engineers based out of a San Francisco office. And even more importantly, as they are supposedly focused on adding value, everyone else around them using Twitter is finding ways to profit from it. Developers are coming up with a better user experience and charging for applications, companies are building robust CRM tools and charging businesses to use them and even a countless number of designers are making money from making backgrounds to use on Twitter profile pages that we can’t even measure to find out how many people even get to see it or navigate to a URL listed on it.

As Biz said it best, “We are just working to keep it working,” and I am happy with that, though I caution the team that they may have missed their own boat.

(And Twitter, if you are reading this, I hope you find an amazing value-add business model. With all of the innovations happening, driven by the community using your service, it saddens me to think that the only one that seems viable now is more ads.)

If Blellow is Twitter for freelancers, TribeHQ is Twitter for professionals.

TribeHQ is one of the latest flavors of microblogging, this time around with a targeted audience of business professionals. Much like LinkedIn became the social network for professionals, TribeHQ is poised to be that resource in microblogging.

Launched by co-founders Paul Jacobs and Tim de Jardine in late 2008 and set up in private beta until just a few weeks ago, TribeHQ is already making waves. I’ve been a user on the site for a few months now, but traffic has certainly picked up now that the site is public and TechCrunch has sent hundreds inbound.

While TribeHQ may look similar to other microblogs in design and function, it does a number of things differently than its peers, including groups, messaging, subscriptions and jobs.

Pre-determined Groups for Users

When you first log on as a user, the idea is to find the tribes that fit in with your profession, that way you can stay connected to your industry and share the knowledge you have with other like-minded users. TribeHQ gives you a nice search box to find groups, but don’t be surprised if your exact field isn’t listed. I found marketing and advertising to be listed in the same group, though both professions lead very different lives.

Most social networking platforms allow users to create the groups, but this organization helps establish some parameters for getting the site started and I wouldn’t be surprised if they open up group creation to the users later on.

Each User has a Cave Wall

Similar to how users have their own wall on Facebook where friends can leave messages, TribeHQ has a similar featured called a Cave Wall. Users can scrawl messages onto your wall as they pass by and you can also reply to messages left behind.

Subscriptions and Allies

Staying connected with content on TribeHQ happens by way of joining a tribe or identifying an individual user as an ally. If you join a group, all the resulting activity will be available from the tribe button on your main home page. If you mark someone as an ally, you will see all of their messages under the ally button, similar to how your home screen on Twitter displays tweets from all of those you follow.

Posting Jobs

Any user may create a profile for their company and post jobs to TribeHQ for free. If you fill out your user profile “properly,” TribeHQ will even try to match you up with the jobs you may be interested in. On each job posting page, users can post messages to the company who is hiring, opening up a dialogue not generally present in the jobseeker environment.

Outside of these new features, there are several components you will be entirely familiar with:

• each user has their own profile page
• all messages must be posted in 140 characters or less

I’ve joined five tribes so far: Marketing / Advertising, Social Media Specialists, Web Designers, Bloggers and Entrepreneurs. Some tribes are really taking off in terms of conversations, though others are running slightly more stale.

As more users find the site and the team continues to work through suggestions and new features, I hope we see this site grow and get a chance to see its true potential. If you decide to join, you can find me on TribeHQ as miketempleton.

Lee Aase, Chancellor of Social Media University, Global (SMUG) and Director of Syndications and Social Media for Mayo Clinic, will be holding a free, one-hour intense Twitter training session with some employees of Mayo Clinic, but he’s also opening up the experience to anyone else interested in learning.

The training session, dubbed #tweetcamp, runs from 2:30-3:30pm CT today, with more information available at SMUG.

1. Anyone can participate, whether live or not, by going through the slides and tweeting comments or questions using the #tweetcamp hashtag. Please begin by introducing yourself and where you’re tweeting from.
2. We will have a group of participants going through this together at 2:30 p.m. in Rochester, but can accommodate a limited number joining us by phone conference. If you are interested in this, please send an email to me, and my assistant will let you know if we are able to accommodate you live on the call.
3. Please re-tweet this event invitation to your followers. I hope to use this event as another illustration (besides what you see in the slides above) of Twitter’s power to make connections rapidly.
4. The beauty of the #tweetcamp hashtag is that the discussion can continue even after the one-hour live session is done, and hopefully you’ll make connections through the introductions with other people who have common interests in social media and/or health care.
5. See the rest of the Twitter curriculum.

If you can’t get dialed-in to the session (Lee has a limited number that can participate via teleconference), you can walk through the slides on your own. Lee does a great job providing direction and guidance in his presentations.

If you have any feedback for Lee or are looking for a bright mind to follow, catch him on Twitter as @leeaase.

You can follow the event and see who the top hashtag contributors are by visiting the What the Hashtag?! page for #tweetcamp, available here: http://wthash.com/tweetcamp

Twitpay, a project created during Atlanta Startup Weekend 2, finally emerged from beta status (something Gmail is still holding on to) just over 30 days ago. While they’ve been already been around for quite some time, the team finally felt the bugs had been ironed out and the product was ready to roll.

Here’s what has me excited about Twitpay:

Payments no longer powered by PayPal.

While PayPal is a tool that many already use (especially early adopters), it does create a barrier to use if a new Twitter user doesn’t have an account there. Also, if this was simply a service that piggybacked off of PayPal, why not just PayPal someone the money directly?

Payments sent through the Twitpay service are handled by Amazon Payments. While a lot of people may have PayPal accounts, even more people have Amazon accounts. Amazon Payments acts as an extension of your basic Amazon account. And in the words of Twitpay, “that means we don’t have to be the middle-man for your cash.” It also allows the team to focus on adding new features and the core functions of their business, rather than the actual process of payment transfers.

Signing up is easy.

To get started sending payments, just hit http://twitpay.me/account/claim and punch in your Twitter username. Twitpay will send you a PIN via direct message (you must be following the @twitpay account prior to doing this) that you can use to confirm your account. Notice you’re not giving away passwords anywhere.

Once you have your PIN and have claimed your account, connect it up to your Amazon account with a few more clicks (plus an email verification) and you’re ready to go.

Sending payments is easy.

If your friend caught the last check at lunch because you forgot your wallet, just pull out your iPhone, fire up Tweetie and send him a message: @jensenrf twitpay $7.65 for lunch

Twitpay records this transaction, called a “promise” in Twitpay lingo, and stores it in both your account and your friend’s account (in this case, @jensenrf).

Actual money won’t change hands until you settle up with those you owe, and that’s where Amazon Payments comes in. You can settle with a single person, or with everyone you owe. The Amazon Payments website will walk you through the steps.

While there are already competing platforms for moving money on Twitter (Tipjoy uses PayPal backend), I can see Twitpay quickly gaining ground as more begin using it. What will be most exciting for me is when I can pay for my meal at a restaurant (who also uses Twitter) using a quick tweet payment.

For more great reading on Twitpay, take a look at the Twitpay article by Jesse Stay on LouisGray.com.

Ev Williams, founder of Twitter, will be speaking at a number of events at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln today. Williams is a Nebraska native and attended UNL as a student. Check out our post, “Who is Evan Williams?” to learn more about his background and how we ended up in the top slot at Twitter.

These events are not open to the public (don’t you wish you were a UNL student right about now?), though two of them will be streamed live online.

The session at the Raikes School will go from 1:30-2:30 pm CT at http://raikes.unl.edu, and at the Journalism college from 3-4 pm at http://newsnetnebraska.org.

More details from the UNL press release below:

Evan Williams, the founder and chief executive of Twitter, will be at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln April 10 for a series of student events. The events will include question-and-answer sessions with students in the Jeffrey S. Raikes School of Computer Science and Management and the College of Journalism and Mass Communications that will be streamed for the public on the Internet.

Plans for Williams’ visit to UNL include lunch with representatives of the Raikes School and the University of Nebraska Foundation, followed by a broader discussion with Raikes School and several College of Business Administration students, availability with media, followed by a meeting with College of Journalism and Mass Communications students and an interview for the Campus Voices radio program. These sessions are not open to the public.

[via Danny Schreiber at Silicon Prairie News]

Do you spend a lot of time on Twitter wishing you could find links to articles NOT talking about Twitter or social media? Birdhive may be the creative outlet you are looking for.

Birdhive is an aggregator for creative project tweets. As TechMeme is to popular tech topics, Birdhive is to creative works. The team describes Birdhive as a way for people to share fun, creative projects they’ve found through Twitter.

As more people rely on Twitter for its real-time search capabilities, they can also turn to Birdhive as a filter for creative works and tweets about graphic design, photography, traditional art, music, crafts and more.

To submit a link to the Birdhive site, first you have to follow their Twitter account (@birdhive). Then there are three ways to submit a tweet:

• Send them a Direct Message
• Add #bh to your tweet (provided you’re following them)
• Send a reply to @birdhive

All inbound tweets are then reposted on the site into specific categories. Each category shows the latest submissions plus the top ten contributors to the category. To stay up to date when new links are submitted, you can always visit the website or subscribe to the RSS feed for each specific category.

Birdhive was created by Nial Giacomelli (@NialGiacomelli) and Glynn Smith (@____________g)

Official as of yesterday, Qwest Communications now has an online team of customer service reps strictly dedicated to interacting with customers via social media. Among those social media tools Qwest is using, Twitter will most likely play a large role.

The new Qwest initiative, aptly titled, “Talk to Qwest,” includes the talents of seven employees, each formerly from different departments and roles within the company.

To see what Qwest is up to, visit their new social media portal at socialmedia.qwest.com. You’ll find links to their Twitter account (@TalkToQwest), a Viddler profile with several intro videos from employees and an email address specifically for this team.

The Twitter profile is decked out with good info, contact details and a link to the main Qwest website. I would probably change it to link to their social media portal, but that’s just me.

As of this writing the account was following 440 people and had 316 followers. Many of the updates are being posted from the ever-popular TweetDeck client, though you’ll also see updates sprinkled in from the basic web interface. In addition to the customer service account, Qwest has also set up a news feed for Twitter (@QwestNews).

For a long time @ComcastCares has been the leading example of a company doing customer service right on Twitter. Will Frank Eliason and his team fade into the past with Qwest now launching something new? Only time can tell, but I imagine we won’t stop hearing about Comcast for quite some time.

[via Phoenix Business Journal]

Tonight Loic Le Meur unveiled the preview version of Seesmic Desktop, the company’s new multi-network application. Seesmic Desktop will support all the same features you found in Twhirl and more. It’s still on the AIR platform, just like Twhirl and many of the more popular clients.

As I was watching the UStream feed I noticed a ton of users commenting on how it looks just like TweetDeck. I beg to differ. Sure, there’s only so many ways you can build a multi-column Twitter application so they’re generally going to look alike. Where Twhirl separates itself from TweetDeck is it’s graphical presentation and its ability to handle multiple accounts. You’ll also find a featured called “User Lists”, which is similar to (but different than) groups. How? Hell if I know.

Multi-account, multi-column client

The preview version seems to be a good start. As you can see above, I’ve got both my personal Twitter account and our Microblink account set up. Any accounts you have can come all in one feed or in separate feeds. I find it nice to separate the main feed but consolidate the Replies feed to save on space. As was the case before, you can also set up multiple Twitter searches and add them as columns. Loic tells us that there’s no limit to the number of columns you can have, but I’m sure it’s limited by what your machine can handle.

Switching user accounts could not be easier. To change the account you’re tweeting from, just hit the account list menu in the upper left and select an account. If you try to retweet or reply to any tweet in a timeline, it’ll change accounts automagically depending on who received it. If more than one account got that tweet, the currently selected account will be used. I’m not really sure how it handles that on search results – probably just uses the selected account.

Also, one of the beautiful things it does when consolidating your timelines is removing duplicates. You’ll see which users received that tweet instead of seeing it twice.

System Resources

After having just two accounts and two searches running for half an hour, Seesmic Desktop jumped up to 150MB of RAM usage. That’s not a terribly high amount considering TweetDeck is notorious for gobbling up to 1GB of RAM if left open long enough. CPU usage seemed a little high for my liking, ranging from 8% to 20% most of the time. Could be better, but could be much worse.

The Layout of the Future

I’ve recently been convinced that a strict multi-column view is no longer the way of the future. TweetDeck gained accolades (and was heavily loathed) for requiring users to use an entire screen. The new wave of layout is going to be a columnar approach but with the ability to quickly add columns or navigate to other columns. Let’s just call it a tab/column hybrid. EventBox is a great example of this, as is Nambu. Seesmic Desktop makes a great effort to move toward the hybridized look and feel but for some reason just feels like it misses the boat.

To add a column, you have to “detach” it. So first, you have to load it in the far-left column, then click the little arrow to send it on its own. I’m not a real fan of the extra step and it’s going to confuse new users who didn’t watch Loic’s demo.

URL Shortening and Image Posting

At the current time, Seesmic Desktop supports bit.ly, twurl.nl, snurl.com, digg.com, tr.im and is.gd. TwitPic is currently the only image provider, but there were allusions to others being added. If you’re looking for new and exciting, here’s where Seesmic Desktop steps off the beaten path – it allows you to take a snapshot using your webcam and upload it directly from the client. It’s pretty dang simple and I’m surprised that nobody else had done that before.

Limitations of the Preview

Seesmic Desktop will ultimately support Twitter, Seesmic, FriendFeed, Laconica, and Ping.fm. However, the only service you can add right now are Twitter accounts. There’s also the previously mentioned limitation to just TwitPic and there are also more URL shorteners and image hosting sites coming.

How to get it

If you want to get your hands on the preview, you have to be a member of Team Seesmic. Head to desktop.seesmic.com and sign up. Once you confirm your account, you’ll be able to download it. If you like Twhirl, you should sign up as they generally out new versions to Team Seesmic a couple days in advance.

Video Walkthrough

What do you think?

If you’ve used it or have an opinion based on this article, leave us a comment. Is this the right direction or was Twhirl’s multi-window tabbed approach better? Is it going to be stiff competition for TweetDeck?

Yesterday marked the resurgence of the Twitter Failwhale and a number of technical issues. Plagued with disappearing avatars, lost direct messages and delayed tweets, the Twitter team worked to isolate the problem. From their past stability and scaling work Twitter has been broken into a number of subsystems, but the issues experienced yesterday still required an unscheduled maintenance window.

Through Twitter’s growing pains their maturity is beginning to show. The team was quick to respond to issues through tweets, multiple status updates on their status blog and a post on the main company blog explaining the situation and thanking the community for their patience.

Overall, Twitter was down for less than an hour and even though there were a number of technical hiccups Twitter was available for most of the day. For those of you keeping score at home, Twitter no longer highlights what functionality is at risk, though their uptime reports show them at 99.88% uptime over March and April.