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Top 20 Apps For Managing Social Media

HootSuite Restores Service After Amazon's Web Service Outage

HootSuite, one of the most popular tools for tracking social media mentions and posting to multiple sites, was among the services knocked offline by a failure in Amazon's East Coast cloud services data center.

After being out of commission most of Thursday, HootSuite was able to restore service at about 9:20 pm Pacific time--although the company warned that some accounts and profiles added since Wednesday night might be unavailable, presumably because that data was trapped in Amazon-hosted servers that remained inaccessible.

The outage resulted in much wailing and moaning from HootSuite addicts who were forced to make an abrupt switch to another tool, at least temporarily.

HootSuite Adds Security Features

Before the company's week went to hell, HootSuite announced new security features, including on option to use the service via https-encrypted connections.

This means HootSuite users can secure all their interactions with the service--not just passwords but also the transmission of browser session cookies that, if intercepted, can be used to hack an account. HootSuite is not making encrypted connections the default, partly because that could cause problems with some firewall and browser configurations, but users can toggle it on.

HootSuite is also extending the secure profiles feature announced late last month to include mobile clients for three mobile platforms: Android, iOS (iPhone and iPad), and BlackBerry. The idea here is to secure social media profiles against misfires, such as personal posts mistakenly sent to corporate accounts, by inserting a double-check confirmation message users must click past before the message is published. The feature is available to customers of HootSuite Enterprise Edition on both web and mobile clients.

Around the Web

Mashable: Mike Butcher at Mashable has a detailed analysis of the rumored purchase of Tweetdeck by either Twitter or UberMedia and why Twitter really needs to win any bidding war. His thesis is that Tweetdeck's desktop tool for accessing Twitter via its application programming interface, rather than twitter.com, could be a powerful tool for a competitor interested in capturing ad revenue on top of the Twitter service and denying it to Twitter the company.

E-Commerce Times: Columnist Sidney Hill asks Is 'Social' Business Collaboration Just an Expensive Fad? He seems to think the answer is "yes" because the current generation of enterprise social tools add incremental value, if any, to established groupware and collaboration systems. "If you need to enable broader collaboration across departments, products like Microsoft's SharePoint or IBM's Lotus suite offer more than adequate functionality. Both of these products also now boast social networking functionality, if you crave that as well," he writes.