--- Does THIS Look Like Twitter? ---

 JOIN STATUSPIPE! The picture on your right is for StatusPipe, a new (free) service that I just rolled out for agents & workgroups to interact with each other and clients on real-estate projects. Does it resemble Twitter? It probably should, since StatusPipe is loosely based on the Laconia Status.Net engine, which is nearly a 1:1 knockoff on the popular Twitter microblogging service.

So, you may wonder, where's the benefit in Status Pipe if I've already got a Twitter account? Well, the answer is that StatusPipe is for the kind of team-messaging that you really don't want on your Twitter account, because (frankly) it's too boring for your followers and the "uninitiated" to read.

Here's the skinny: Originally, Twitter was intended for users to write short "status updates" of up to 140 characters in length to update their friends with their current status - ie: what they were doing, what they were working on, important factoids, etc. Over time, though, Twitter turned into a marketing tool, and now most agents use it to write short, witty posts about their favorite sports teams, market trends, local events, and everything EXCEPT hum-drum work related issues.

So, the goal of Status Pipe is to provide another venue for the work stuff, and it gives you a large array of tools along with the 140-character post limit. You can post & read StatusPipe from your mobile device (just like Twitter), and it even integrates with your Twitter & Facebook accounts - so if you feel like publishing those updates elsewhere on the web, it's not a manual task (or, you can leave the accounts unconnected and use the "publish to Facebook/Twitter buttons" to do it manually.

I don't expect that Status Pipe will be the "next big thing", but I do hope that it'll be a useful tool for agents to publish updates to their colleagues & push listings out to clients, and maybe it'll even have some non-Twitter value for stuff that just gets lost on the world's biggest microblogging service.

In other words, not being pressured to enroll everybody on Planet Earth has some advantages. Give Status Pipe a try and let me know if you like it (BTW, it has a slick "invite your friends" feature that you can use to get your team onboard with it, if and when you decide to do that).