A new question and answer feature is slowly being rolled out by the Tumblr team. We first spotted this feature on Jacob Bijani’s (Tumblr’s creative director) tumble log. Since then, the feature has been rolled out to a number of Tumblr users. However, there is still no date when the rest of its users will see this feature enabled.

With this new feature any text post can also become a question. By checking off “Let people answer this” an answer form will display in both the dashboard stream and tumblelog and in either area a small form will appear. This form will allow users to provide answers to the question which will also be stored as notes for the post.

For those who have not already added a comment system, this is a great way to get feedback or collaborate with other users on Tumblr.

Where are the premium services?

Tumblr has a lot of work ahead of them. Both Twitter and Tumblr hinted at business models in early 2009. Twitter is making good on their part – kind of – with the release of a variety of new features and non-paid ad spots starting to display in profiles. Tumblr, on the other hand, hasn’t shown any signs of launching their premium services which were hinted at after taking additional funding late last year. Tumblr’s new answers features seems to be slowly rolling out to users so what else does the Tumblr team have in their sandbox?

Have you spotted any additional features in the Tumblr sandbox? Shoot us a note to our tip line (tips [at] microblink [dot] com) or leave us a comment below.

(images via robotindisguise)

This week has been busy for the Twitter GUI. Here’s the rundown on what may look different.

Replies are Now Mentions

On Monday Twitter announced that the Replies tab will instead be referred to as Mentions. Twitter updated the feature earlier this week to include all mentions of a person’s username, rather than limit it only to messages beginning with the username.

The Twitter team determined that as the service has grown, people have changed the way they are using it (and the way Twitter had intended it to be used). As a result, more people are using @reply usernames when referring to other people or accounts on Twitter. With more businesses and brands setting up shop on Twitter everyday, this practice will only increase. It’s essentially good karma to include the username of a brand you are talking about if they are on Twitter.

“Sitting down to talk through @microblink ideas and happenings with @miketempleton and @chewbocka; focusing on @wthashtag work” -@jensenrf

“Getting ready to present with @hillabean to a room of Iowa CCIM Chapter folks. Say hello to the room!” -@nathantwright

Other popular desktop tools have already incorporated this feature, including Twhirl and Tweetdeck. In fact, that feature alone used to be enough of a reason to use them in the first place.

In addition, the Replies tab is no longer visually represented as “Replies”. Instead you’ll see your username in it’s place, like “@miketempleton”.

Twitter Hires Creative Director

As Twitter faces the challenge of keeping its interface both simple and relevant, they’ve acknowledged that it requires the right person with the right vision and sense of leadership. Twitter found that in Doug Bowman, former Visual Design Lead at Google, and hired him on as Creative Director.

The Creative Director role previously fell under Biz Stone’s responsibilities, but he mentions that “as the company’s team continued to grow…it made sense for me to align more with Evan…on the company-building aspects of Twitter.”

Twitter Sidebar Gets Restructured

It’s been just three weeks since Twitter began integrating the Twitter Search bar into the upper right-hand corner of the web interface (Mark still hadn’t seen his interface updated as of this week). Overall the improvements were a big step forward, but some were still slightly unhappy with how things were shuffled around.

Today, on April Fool’s Day, Twitter unveiled even more adjustments to the sidebar. After logging in this morning I noticed several changes:

The upper right-hand set of links has been reverted to default (moving Profile and Settings links back to the top from the previous configuration).

The outlined “tabs” are no longer present in the sidebar.

Twitter Search bar has been moved into the sidebar.

Twitter Search trending topics are now listed in full below the search bar.

Overall the changes are fairly simple adjustments, but it falls right in line with what Twitter described when hiring Doug Bowma: “the challenge of staying simple and relevant”.

I like the new changes because it gives me a link to my Settings from any Twitter page I access (previously you couldn’t access this via link if you were on someone else’s profile page) and because the trending topics are now displayed at all times. This keeps them in front of me throughout the day and encourages me to interact with them. Before the trending topics were only available if you selected the dropdown display.

Could this be the work of Doug Bowman being realized, just two days after being hired? It’s hard to say, but I’m guessing they’ve had these adjustments in mind for some time.

Now let’s just hope this new, improved user interface isn’t a cruel April Fool’s joke that will be whisked away tomorrow and stashed being a premium Twitter account.

Announced earlier today on the company blog, Yammer has released two new features to its enterprise microblogging solution: a visual organization chart and a link bookmarklet.

Visualize your Coworkers

Remember when you first joined Yammer and it asked for your reports and your superiors? Now Yammer can take that information and organize it into a visual organization chart for your company. The org chart for Microblink isn’t very impressive, as its just the three of us with nobody reporting to anyone. If you’ve got a large group on Yammer and would like to share a graphic (with faces/names blurred of course), please let us know.

Bookmarklet for Links

In addition to the org chart, Yammer has also made it much easier to share links and articles with your corporate network. Bookmarklets have existed in the regular microblogging world for some time, acting as bookmarking shortcuts for specific applications or websites.

The new Yammer bookmarklet allows you to quickly post any page (or highlighted text) you are looking at to your colleagues on Yammer. This saves you time because you don’t need copy the link, open an application, paste the information in, etc. Just click the bookmark, post and go.

It’s exciting to see Yammer continuing to grow and always adding new features as requested by their users.

According to an article in the WSJ, “[Twitter] is watching the outside initiatives closely as it prepares to launch its own fee-based services this year, but doesn’t view them as competition.”

Biz Stone acknowledged that “We want to work with those companies that are already making an effort,” as has been evidenced by Twitter including sidebar ads for apps from third-parties.

Stone also mentioned a product manager has been brought on board to oversee the new commercial accounts. Similar to what was discussed on Microblink earlier this year, these “pro” accounts would offer additional features to users for a fee. No date has been set for the launch of paid accounts, though Twitter said earlier this year that it would announce a revenue model in the first quarter of 2009 (which is nearly up).

One question that remains in my mind is how much these pro accounts will be worth to Twitter. Will they only target corporations, or will the “average” power user also get to take advantage of them? Given how much I’ve spent purely on Twitter-related apps for the iPhone, shelling out $5-10 a month for one application that could do it all AND more wouldn’t be a bad deal.

Also, this recent announcement from Twitter is not to be confused with the satirical post from BBspot earlier this month.

Twitter’s been making some changes recently, including rolling out OAuth, adding search/trend functions, and implementing a new More button for loading tweets. The other major new thing you’re going to see is a small box below your stats on your profile.

Oooo, shiny new stuff

“Ads” that are being seen are primarily for applications and services regarding Twitter. Some examples include Tweetie, Twittervision, and ExecTweets. The ads are very discreet and could probably be glossed over if you weren’t looking for it. If this is the way that Twitter intends to roll out an advertising plan, I’ll be thrilled to see what they come up with.

So what do you think? Is this a good beginning to advertisement? What would you do differently? Sound off in the comments.

UPDATE: We’re not the only ones noticing the latest external ad rollout. See more great discussions here:

• Like we said. Twitter introduces advertising.

While Twitter fans were waiting for the new integrated search bar to be rolled out to their profiles, Facebook fans are awaiting the new home page update to be applied. Facebook announced the beginning of the rollout for new home pages on March 9, but I just had mine updated on Friday (March 13).

Inside Facebook’s Justin Smith (@justinsmith) wrote up some first impressions of the new home page design, including a mention that “the stream emphasizes status updates, like Twitter.” Perhaps Facebook is still slightly bitter about Ev Williams and company turning down their buyout offer last November?

The look of the new home page feels very much like Twitter to me, mostly because they were one of (if not the) first to use the vertical stream of posts with an update box at the top.

However, the way content filters in and the options users have to take action looks much more like FriendFeed.

Even with a 33% growth in traffic over the past month, Twitter has a long ways to catch up to the number of users on Facebook (currently 175 million worldwide). As such, most people will probably see Twitter as “oh, like updating my status on Facebook”, rather than Facebook status updates looking like an expansion/copy of Twitter.

Although I personally use Twitter more than Facebook and FriendFeed combined, I wouldn’t mind seeing some in-line commenting, liking-functionality or ways to group users/content on Twitter that are already found on Facebook and FriendFeed.

Have you gotten the new Facebook home page layout? What are your thoughts so far? Are you updating statuses in both places?

Last Thursday was rumored to be the day that Twitter would roll out the new integrated Twitter Search to all users. A business account I manage saw the changes prior to last Thursday and my personal account saw the changes on Thursday. However, there are still a few waiting for the changes to take effect.

@hughbriss is still waiting on integrated search

For the most part, I’ve been thoroughly impressed with Twitter’s work in bringing search into the main interface. For the longest time I’ve been using the Twitter Search Box Greasemonkey script from our How to Become a Twitter Power User With 5 Greasemonkey Scripts post, but the new search blows this out of the water.

Twitter Home Sees Slight Adjustment

Your new Twitter homepage gets a number of subtle tweaks, including the addition of the search bar to the upper right toolbar, as well as a drop-down trends list. The profile and settings links have been moved down into the sidebar below you avatar and username to make room for the new search bar and drop-down.

Search Results Get Drastic Makeover

Although individual user homepages didn’t change that much, the search results page looks brand new and ties in much more closely with the Twitter service as a whole. What was listed before on an individual subdomain is now available at twitter.com/search (only for users with integrated search already available). Also, because search now lives in a subdirectory rather than a subdomain, users are able to retain the Twitter logo in top left (which links to users’ homepage) and the toolbar in top right (user settings, log out, etc.).

Search results take on the default Twitter color scheme, but the rest of the content is mostly the same Summize-purchased bits we’re all used to. Two additions we’d not seen before are the featured user link (which profiles a featured user’s avatar, username and bio) and the username search results (which uses your Twitter Search query to check for related usernames on Twitter. There’s no word on why/how users are selected for the featured users heading, but my bets are that it’s similar to those listed in the suggested followers portion of the new Twitter signup process.

Overall I’m very happy with how the search integration went (even better than original Summize integration in my opinion) and will be uninstalling that Greasemonkey script shortly. Leave it to Twitter to watch what others are doing and then find a way to do it better. Now if only that would work for a business model.

Tumblr continues to confuse me. As the team continues to add new features to their platform, I no longer know what Tumblr is and even more what it wants to become.

Early last week the Tumblr team announced two new features. One continues to build on its strength of making it easier to publish content to the web while the other feels like a hand forcing Tumblr to be something else. Tumblr is growing, but with these latest changes it seems like Tumblr just made the leap out of microblogging.

A great addition to the “how” of posting to Tumblr is the new call in number feature. From a phone registered with Tumblr users can record an audio post from their phone. After recording, the call is then published to the tumblelog in a matter of a few minutes.

Providing this service continues to build on what Tumblr does best by making it even simpler to post your content. Overall this is a great addition, however, Tumblr needs to drop the creepy computer voice if it still wants to considers itself “sexy as hell“.

Tumblr now provides several publishing options

Along with calling into Tumblr users now have more control on when their posts will be published. Posts now have the option to be published at a specific time, processed in a queue or saved as a draft.

Options like these have been popular on Twitter as a third party service. Many blogs also allow for this type of scheduling however there is something about this new feature being developed by Tumblr that has me questioning its future.

Over the last few iterations Tumblr has become more blog-like. From a use perspective, Tumblr no longer competes with other microblogs but instead pushes features that match up with other blogging platforms like Blogger, Wordpress and Vox. Tumblr is walking a thin line of being a robust microblog or becoming a crippled blog.

We know Tumblr is searching for a business model and needs to start focusing on premium services, but these last few updates have me questioning what Tumblr is and how to balance it with my current mix of online publishing.

Hopefully the Tumblr team comes through with some answers soon because right now I’m getting lost in the noise of new features and losing sight of Tumblr’s real advantages in the blogging/microblogging world.

Even though 12 seconds is a ridiculously short time to run out of material, it can happen. If you’ve run out of videos to make or aren’t sure how exactly to dive into the video microblogging world, the crew at 12Seconds has launched a new feature called 12erator to help you come up with video topics.

Once you log in to 12Seconds, you’ll see the video recording box at the top. Directly below that (as shown in the image) is a link to the 12erator. The 12erator suggests a topic for you to base your video on. Some topics I’ve been given were “The Most Annoying Sound In the World”, “How I Feel About Fighting”, and “The Craziest Dream I’ve Had Recently”. Once you find a topic you like, hit the Make It button and you’re off.

The 12erator should really help new users get started on 12Seconds. One of the biggest hurdles is not knowing what to create videos for but 12Seconds helps push out new ideas constantly. In addition to this feature, they’ve also got a “12 Challenge” where they’ll give you a topic and you record a video for that, then see what everyone else said about it too. If you’re new to this kind of microblogging, it’s dead simple to use if you have a webcam and microphone so hop on and give it a shot.

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.