Image by Mickipedia via Flickr

Twitter is a great platform for making short announcements, or to send a quick reply to one. But as a conversation platform, Twitter is sorely lacking. And yet people keep trying, and then take offense when others point out the obvious – that Twitter conversations are awkward, hard to follow, and unnecessary, thanks to services like FriendFeed.

Image by Robert Scoble via FriendFeed

Facebook is bringing out some major changes to their service in the next week. One of the most visible changes will be its new website design, despite only having the current one for about nine months. And with this new design, their ripping-off of lifestream aggregator FriendFeed seems to be complete.

Image via CrunchBase

Ever wish that Twitter was a good platform for conversations, rather than simply being a way to push announcements at people? Have I got a site for you! Blellow is a new microblogging site, currently in beta, that does it better than Twitter. While the beta is still missing a few useful features, what it does have already shows that the people behind Blellow have a better way to communicate via microblogging.

Image by Susan NYC via Flickr

Sorry to be such a downer, but with even my own optimism about the markets beginning to flag, I've begun to ask this question. As funding dries up and businesses close, what will happen to the world of social media?

One of the most important things any programmer needs to be taught is how to use version control. There's no getting around it; you could be the world's best hacker, but if you make one stupid little mistake without version control, that great, world-changing project of yours is scrap. And generally, most of us do use version control. For our code.

Image by coldacid via Flickr

I'm going to be away for most of the weekend, but before I head out, I want to talk a little bit about Taskerrific. I hope to have the service up and in public beta by the start of May, and in the meantime, I'll give occasional updates into the progress of Taskerrific's development.

Cartoon by Rob Cottingham via ReadWriteWeb

If you're American, as most of my blog audience appears to be, you've probably never heard of North By Northeast, the Toronto counterpart to the well known South By Southwest festival in Austin, Texas. Well, counterpart as far as music, film and art go. When it comes to tech, NXNE is totally lacking, whereas SXSW is strong and hearty.

Image via CrunchBase

Read updates below.

Do you protect your updates on Twitter? Well, don't bother. Thanks to the magic that is Twitter Search, the whole world can see what you tweet with little trouble, whether you protect your tweets or not.

Image via CrunchBase

I've been taken to task for my post earlier this week about tweet protection being meaningless. It turns out that the person whose tweets lead to the article toggles protection on and off, and apparently quite frequently. But that begs the question: If you're turning protection on and off, why bother having it on in the first place? And if you just straight-up have it on, why are you bothering with Twitter in the first place?

Since the beginning of the week, I've been part of a small business startup program. It's got a five week in-class portion, which began Monday, where the people in the program learn how to assemble a business plan. The program is really geared towards local, home based businesses such as housepainters and furniture refinishers. Taskerrific is their first view of a social media service.