Getting too many updates to keep up with? Don’t have more than a few minutes per day to spend on Twitter?

Try Twitter for Busy People:

We found ourselves wanting to see what our friends were up to “at a glance”.
By using the Twitter web site, our “active” friends often push the status messages of less active friends far down the page, or off the page completely.

So, we created this site, to see each of our friends at once (up to 500). Then we can quickly “mouse around” and see what each of our friends are up to. If we want to check recent history of a specific friend, it’s just one click. Of course, there are many other things we often wish to do, and those will be forthcoming!

Stay up on them by checking out our News page, or following us on Twitter!
If you have an idea for improving the interface, please Let us know!

I just checked this out briefly but it looks like it could be useful. Let me know what you think!

The Hatcher Group now has a Fan Page on Facebook. We will be using the page to send out information on what The Hatcher Group is up to as well as updates on the excellent work our clients are doing.

Please visit the page now and become a fan!

Here are a few examples of the types of updates we’ll be sending:

Washington Area Women’s Foundation Awards $400,000 To Help Low-Income Women and Girls Most Hurt by Recession:

“These new grants will help some of the most vulnerable women in our community who are truly struggling in this recession,” said Phyllis Caldwell, president of Washington Area Women’s Foundation. “This investment will help them improve their lives and support their families by gaining control of their finances, moving into better jobs and claiming valuable tax credits.”

National Center for Summer Learning Urges Schools to Use American Recovery and Reinvestment Dollars on Summer Learning Programs:

“Cutting summer school and summer learning programs is short-sighted because more kids will fall behind academically,” says Ron Fairchild, executive director of the National Center for Summer Learning. “Instead, states, superintendents, boards of education and principals should spend ARRA education dollars to make high-quality summer learning programs available to children from low-income families as a smart way to close the achievement gap.”

New Findings Show Innovative Savings Program Helps Youth Aging Out of Foster Care Save $3 Million, Build Assets:

More than five years after launching one of the nation’s most innovative matched savings program for extremely disadvantaged youth, the Jim Casey Youth Opportunities Initiative is releasing new findings showing that more than 3,000 young people aging out of foster care collectively have saved more than $3.1 million. This kind of resilience extends even to youth who face additional challenges, such as young parents and those youth who have been homeless at some point in their lives.

Twitter works just fine on its own. But to get the most out of it, desktop applications go a long way. Fortunately for us, Mashable has taken the time to put together a comprehensive review of such applications:

As such, getting by on the limited feature set available via Twitter.com is difficult at best. Enter the desktop application, a third-party piece of software that you can install on your computer to interface with Twitter and get more out of your microblogging activities.

Now that Twitter is older than a toddler, you have a variety to choose from. From apps for groups, Mac and PC specific clients, and apps that let you do a whole lot more than tweet, you can use this guide to help you find the desktop client that’s right for you.

Jon Kaplan, who is an Open Society Institute Baltimore Community Fellow, is a finalist in People Magazine’s All-Stars Among Us competition. Congrats, Jon.

Do you have 30 seconds to help us out by voting for Jon? It is simple to do, and literally only takes a few seconds.

Here are instructions for voting for Jon:

1. Click this link.

2. Click the logo for the Baltimore Orioles (see below)

3. Click the red “vote for me” button under Jon Kaplan’s name. He is the one on the far right.

4. Have friends that might want to help out as well? Send them the link to this post.

5. You can vote as many times as you like. Please return as often as possible between now and the June 24th deadline.

Still not convinced? Take a look at Kaplan’s pitch below:

Mashable: Why NPR is the Future of Mainstream Media

Compared to cable news, where most networks are shedding viewers, and newspapers, where circulation continues to plummet, NPR is starting to look like they have the future of news all figured out. Or at least, they appear to doing a lot better at it than the rest of the traditional media.

But what is NPR doing differently that’s causing their listener numbers to swell? They basically have a three-pronged strategy that is helping them not only grow now, but also prepare for the future media landscape where traditional methods of consumption (TV, radio, print) could be greatly marginalized in favor of digital distribution.

Clay Shirky: How cellphones, Twitter, Facebook can make history

@DellOutlet Surpasses $2 Million on Twitter

There was some buzz back in December around Dell generating over $1 million in revenue by posting offers and responding to questions on Twitter.com/DellOutlet—there’s still mention of it on Twitter even today. Since we started back in 2007, we’ve earned more than $2 million in revenue at @DellOutlet, attributed directly to our Twitter activity.

We’ve surpassed $2 million in revenue in terms of Dell Outlet sales, but we’re also seeing that it’s driving interest in new product as well. We’re seeing people come from @DellOutlet on Twitter into the Dell.com/outlet site, and then ultimately decide to purchase a new system from elsewhere on Dell.com. If we factor those new system purchases that come from @DellOutlet, we’re actually eclipsed $3 million in overall sales.

Big news:

From the beginning of Facebook, people have used their real names to share and connect with the people they know. This authenticity helps to create a trusted environment because you know the identity of the people and things on Facebook. The one place, though, where your identity wasn’t reflected was in the Web address for your profile or the Facebook Pages you administer. The URL was just a randomly assigned number like “id=592952074.” That soon will change.

We’re planning to offer Facebook usernames to make it easier for people to find and connect with you. When your friends, family members or co-workers visit your profile or Pages on Facebook, they will be able to enter your username as part of the URL in their browser. This way people will have an easy-to-remember way to find you. We expect to offer even more ways to use your Facebook username in the future.

Here is what the change will look like:

As always, Mashable has some useful thoughts on this.

CBR:

Social networking continues to gain momentum in the US and around the world. According to a study on social networking trends by Nielsen Online, the amount of time spent on social networking sites in the US has shot up by 83% from a year earlier.

Nielsen Online data reveals that Facebook users in the US collectively spent 13.9 billion minutes on Facebook in April 2009, a 700% rise compared to 1.7 billion minutes spent over the same period the last year.

Twitter’s increase over last April was a whopping 3700%.

If Twitter hadn’t fully entered the mainstream by June 2009, it certainly crossed that threshold yesterday. Time Magazine’s cover story this week is entitled How Twitter Will Change the Way We Live.

The article provides a good overview of the microblogging platform, as well as three insights in particular that I think are worth highlighting.

Insight 1: Twitter Fundamentally Changes the Nature of Public and Private Events by Creating Publicly Accessible Backchannels for Discussions

The article includes the story of an education conference the author of the piece attended in March of this year. He notes:

Twenty years ago, the ideas exchanged in that conversation would have been confined to the minds of the participants. Ten years ago, a transcript might have been published weeks or months later on the Web. Five years ago, a handful of participants might have blogged about their experiences after the fact.

At the conference, the host introduced a hashtag (#hackedu) participants could use as a backchannel to add an additional layer of conversation to the discussion. For the first few minutes the hashtag was used exclusively by those in the room, but within 30 minutes, others had started to follow and use it to participate in the conversation remotely. The author of the piece, clearly amused by the phenomenon himself, notes that the conversation continued productively for months after the physical conference had ended. Here is how he explains the significance:

Injecting Twitter into that conversation fundamentally changed the rules of engagement. It added a second layer of discussion and brought a wider audience into what would have been a private exchange. And it gave the event an afterlife on the Web. Yes, it was built entirely out of 140-character messages, but the sum total of those tweets added up to something truly substantive, like a suspension bridge made of pebbles.

The Center for American Progress uses a Twitter backchannel to great effect at their regular Internet Advocacy Roundtable events. In fact, they take it a few steps further.

1. They offer streaming web video of the panel discussions. This allows people who aren’t physically attending the event to participate in backchannel discussions and have direct access to the physical discussion.

2. They solicit questions for panelists and speakers using the backchannel. Rather than merely allowing people who aren’t in attendance to comment on the discussion taking place, this allows them to actively participate. The moderator of the events, @drdigipol, culls through the questions and asks the best ones, sometimes less than a minute after they are asked.

Insight 2: 140 Characters Isn’t Nearly as Limiting as it Seems in a World Where People Are Using URL Shorteners and Hyperlinks to Share Information with People Who Trust Them

Twitter users are sharing far more than what they ate for breakfasts. Most importantly, they are sharing hyperlinks among peers in a way that neither Google or Newspapers can:

Websites that once saw their traffic dominated by Google search queries are seeing a growing number of new visitors coming from “passed links” at social networks like Twitter and Facebook. This is what the naysayers fail to understand: it’s just as easy to use Twitter to spread the word about a brilliant 10,000-word New Yorker article as it is to spread the word about your Lucky Charms habit.

We place higher stock in information that comes from trusted sources. If I see an article that I might like to read, I’m more likely to read it if the link came from someone whose opinion I trust on the topic. Media outlets should be celebrating this and looking for ways to exploit facilitate it. My friends can share news content with me far better than any print newspaper, email list or RSS reader ever could.

Insight 3: Twitter’s Ability to Collect and Sort Information in Real-Time Disrupts Google’s Monopoly on Driving Search-Based Web Traffic

The article explains:

Put those three elements together — social networks, live searching and link-sharing — and you have a cocktail that poses what may amount to the most interesting alternative to Google’s near monopoly in searching. At its heart, Google’s system is built around the slow, anonymous accumulation of authority: pages rise to the top of Google’s search results according to, in part, how many links point to them, which tends to favor older pages that have had time to build an audience. That’s a fantastic solution for finding high-quality needles in the immense, spam-plagued haystack that is the contemporary Web. But it’s not a particularly useful solution for finding out what people are saying right now, the in-the-moment conversation that industry pioneer John Battelle calls the “super fresh” Web. Even in its toddlerhood, Twitter is a more efficient supplier of the super-fresh Web than Google. If you’re looking for interesting articles or sites devoted to Kobe Bryant, you search Google. If you’re looking for interesting comments from your extended social network about the three-pointer Kobe just made 30 seconds ago, you go to Twitter.

This has serious implications for anyone interested in how people get news and information. I noticed this a few months ago and pointed out the fact that Twitter is to current information what Google is to relevant information:

If you want to find the website most relevant to a particular keyword - just Google it. But sometimes currency is more important than relevance. We don’t always need the most relevant website for a particular issue - but the most recent. Google News helps with this, but the real-time web is evolving faster than even Google can keep up with.

In May 2008, when China’s Sichuan Province experienced a major earthquake — the news broke on Twitter.

Last month, when the plane landed in the Hudson river — the news broke on Twitter.

When my morning commute is going to be stalled by a malfunction or delay on the DC metro system Red Line — the news breaks on Twitter.

Did I miss any major insights the Time article brings to light? Let us know in the comments. Better yet, let us know on Twitter.

This is an interesting development. Definitely worth keeping an eye on:

Today, we’re announcing our plans to roll out a new advertising platform — Digg Ads. Digg Ads will give you more control over which advertisements are displayed on Digg. The more an ad is Dugg, the less the advertiser will have to pay. Conversely the more an ad is buried, the more the advertiser is charged, pricing it out of the system.

The platform will launch as a pilot in a few months, and it will be an ongoing work in progress as we learn more from the Digg community and adjust the system. We’re still in very early stages of working with advertisers and building the system, but we wanted you to be the first to hear about our plans.

Jeff Jarvis loves it:

You have to love - or at least pay attention to - Digg’s new advertising system enabling users to vote on ads: The more that users digg an ad, the less the advertiser pays. That’s a reversal of advertising but it’s the way advertising probably needs to go: The better your relationship (which springs from a better product and service), the more your customers will market it for you, the less you’ll have to pay to market it. That is the ideal. Advertising is failure.

This caught our eye this morning:

Things like this make me just love my job.

A few weeks ago, staff from The Hatcher Group, who help out with The Women’s Foundation’s public relations, came in to do hourly one-on-one sessions with select Grantee Partners that we thought would benefit from some training and technical assistance in media relations.

This is all part of The Women’s Foundation’s approach to “beyond the check” grantmaking, wherein we not only provide grants to help our partners conduct their work, but also support them in doing that work more effectively and efficiently.

We started this particular capacity building effort last year at The Hatcher Group’s suggestion and it was a great success, with a number of the meetings leading to significant media coverage, such as that for Fair Fund around their work combatting human trafficking.

This year, they’ve worked their magic again, and yesterday, new Rainmakers Grantee Partner, The Art League–and their “Space of Her Own” program–were featured in a Washington Post story.

The Washington Area Women’s Foundation is an excellent organization and a pleasure to work with. You can learn more about their work here.