Tech Week In Review: Mentions, Search, Chat, Social Media Comments

Twitter Mentions

Twitter has finally fixed their replies feature. Up until now, you could only receive a reply from someone if they started off their tweet with your name. I would get “@rahsheen you so totally rock!”, but if someone said “@abenton @markusrobinson Blackweb 2.0 is awesome, especially @rahsheen” I would never know. Now, Twitter Mentions will find out who is mentioning you in a tweet, regardless of the position of your name. If you use a third-party client, you may have already had this feature, but you may see a speed increase now that it’s part of the API.

Gmail and Twitter Both Make Search Even Better

Gmail recently added an auto-complete search feature to their Labs section. Gmail’s search is already pretty awesome and I use it on the regular, but you have to know all types of funky syntax. For instance, if I was looking for those tracks Weezy sent me from his new album, I would do something like “Weezy filename:(mp3 OR m4a)”. Now, I can just type “Weezy” and then start typing the word “attachments” and Gmail will figure out what I’m looking for.

Twitter has decided to integrate search into their web interface. Rather than just slapping a search box at the top of the page and shuffling you off to another page for the results, they’re going to provide tight integration in the sidebar and display results right on the homepage. Most exciting about this move is that they will be providing persistent searches and displaying trending topics. Most unexciting about this move is that third-party clients already have these features. (Twitter blog)

Zoho Chat 2.0

In case you didn’t know, Zoho is probably the only competition Google Docs has. Now, they have released Zoho Chat 2.0, which integrates most of the major IM platforms with their online applications. Imagine being able to collaborate on the same document with your team via real-time chat. The chat is integrated into most of Zoho’s applications and also puts Zoho in direct competition with Meebo. I’m definitely going to have to check this out. Don’t worry if you don’t have an account, you can sign in with your Google or Yahoo credentials.

Disqus Finally Makes Social Media Comments Public

If you’ve been reading Mashable…What am I saying? of course you read Mashable. Anyway, you may have noticed their Social Media Comments area. Until recently, this Disqus feature was being tested exclusively on Mashable, but is now available to the rest of us. What this means is that you can have mentions of your posts on a bunch of social networks integrated back into your comments section. This will help you keep track of who is talking about your content and help you battle comment fragmentation.

About the Author
Rahsheen has been a certified geek since before it was the thing to do. He started programming and tinkering in the 4th grade. Now, Rahsheen mostly writes on various sites about technology trends in social media and mobile. . He is also a musician, singer, rapper, writer, and producer. @rahsheen - +Rahsheen Porter - coachrah.com
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