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.

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?

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.

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 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.