MaineBusiness.com

Twitter is slowly rolling out a retweet function today. This may seem confusing because retweet is a common way to pass around updates. But it's a bit of a hack that Twitter didn't see coming.

Many third-party apps and services have functions to make retweets easier. Like Lists, Twitter is catching up and adding retweets to its web interface. And like Lists, not everyone can do it. They're rolling it out carefully.

Why bother if the third party apps are doing it? It keeps the Twitter website useful and relevant. Many Twitter users stick to TweetDeck and Twitterific without having to touch the website. This puts a serious crimp in Twitter's plans to make money through advertising.

So it becomes imperative to make Twitter as useful as possible.

Another useful feature is the automatic notice when new tweets are in your feed or list. Twitter.com is slowly catching up to Hootsuite. If it adds scheduling and multiple account features, Hootsuite will be dead to me.

There is an important lesson here. Like many of the ways we use Twitter, retweets were created by users. Twitter didn't create it or imagine it. The same with hashtags.

It takes a certain courage and openess to let your market play with your product and let them create its features. It's not possible for every business. But every business can benefit from watching how its customers use its products.

Start Me Up

Mashable.com has a list of 20 resources for startups. It links to startup kits, information sources and web services. Lots of useful stuff here.

I'm sure MaineBusiness.com was #21 on the list.

Wave What?

Number 12 on that Mashable list is something not a lot of us understand:

"Google Wave: Google's experimental real-time communication platform not only has a consumer version, but also comes in a corporate flavor for users of Google apps. Having your team collaborate on projects through waves is a unique experience, one that we have used with success over here at Mashable. No other social tool has the same collaboration features."

It's not very well understood because not a lot of people are using it. I'm not one of the users but I have requested an invitation.

If you want to figure out what you're missing, you can watch this 80 minute video from Google:

Or you can read this Mashable guide to the wave. But even better is the The Complete Guide to Google Wave. It's an e-book by . The first chapter is an excellent introduction to what it can do.

The chapter includes this video that shows how collaboration with Wave works:

The cool thing is that everything happens in real time. You can see your fellow collaborators type their contributions.

Without getting my hands on it, I can't guess how useful this will be. I have the feeling this can help people working on projects. And I do have a half-baked idea on how this can be used by journalists.

I don't see much upside to being an early adopter here. Wave only is useful if you know other people using it. And there's a learning curve. Translation: Time suck. I'm sure enterprising consultants are investing the time so they can add Google Wave help to their services.

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