Lon S. Cohen is a writer and Director of Communications at @ALSofGNY. He is @obilon on Twitter.
Many banks have started using social websites to help them with everything from healing the financial industry to promoting their latest credit cards. By embracing the most popular tools available, the industry has also been embracing the best [...]

Name: RentShout
Quick Pitch: RentShout advertises rental listings on directories and sites around the web, delivering widespread online visibility right where renters are searching.
Genius Idea: If you need to sublet, rent, or sell a home, apartment, or office, you want to do it fast. Every day that place isn’t filled, the more potential income you [...]

For marketers, Twitter has been a dream come true. It’s an open platform growing at a phenomenal rate. This combination can allow a single tweet to be seen by thousands of potential customers. But as Twitter continues its mainstream ascent, it has been targeted by spammers and scammers, something that doesn’t help legitimate [...]

Real-time search engines made our list as one of the top 5 Twitter related trends to watch, not only because the demand for these tools has increased, but also because we’re seeing services like Tweetmeme and OneRiot innovate at lightning speed in this space.

Collecta, which launches today, is also tackling real-time search, but their search engine uses XMPP technology and works to keep pace with information as it happens — faster than we’ve ever seen before — on blogs, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, news sites, and various other social sites.