Nowadays, status update boxes are everywhere: LinkedIn, Twitter, Friendfeed, Yammer, AIM, GTalk, Facebook and more. The stream is becoming a de facto way that we communicate with others. However, thinking in 140 characters is also changing how I work. I am now using status updates to workstream.
Workstreaming in 140 Characters with Backpack
Where the microblogging posts are really important, we must not forget the automatic posting of things like check-ins of code, edits, etc. to workstreaming. Feeds of all sorts must come into play, and then your 140 character posts become a method of annotation.
Feeds (from logs), aggregation, filtering, microblogging... they're all essential components.
The way I've been workstreaming (along with the rest of our team at New Marketing Labs) is using Socialcast. It's similar to Yammer and you can import other profiles like FriendFeed, among a ton of other features. Besides that, we just like the look/feel of it.
What we're enjoying from using a tool like this is that it allows us to have some standardize tags like #where, #status, etc that we can provide status updates as we need. But, the real gold comes from wanting to pull the info back out. If I'm out-of-pocket for a couple days I could just pull on one of the tags to get a quick overview of everything that our team has worked on in the past couple days; how a particular client is doing or where everyone is (given travel schedules, working remotely and whatnot).
Similar to what Jose said, I know that Chris Brogan has been experimenting with a Tumblr blog as a status update/workstream for himself.
As a software consultant, I have been using Evernote to track my work and time each day because I use a lot of screenshots and find the evernote client application useful. The team workstream introduced with Yammer, SocialText, Backpack (etc) seems very useful to me though and I would eventually like to incorporate that into my larger projects.
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