It appears that some folks are starting to slow down on the Twype (Twitter hype, of course) and looking at the bigger picture impact that the service is making. Whether Twitter survives and / or thrives is not the point really. It’s a very real possibility that the folks at Twitter may have set the table for other niche players to come in and take advantage of the trend that Twitter has really accelerated; which is real time information retrieval.

One person who has had significant success in making real time information work is Marc Benioff, co-founder and chief executive of Salesforce.com. Here’s a guy that can sure spot a need (not just a fad or a trend but a real need) and build a solution that meets the need head on. He helped bring the SaaS (software as a service) CRM and sales force automation business to the forefront of business applications and has been the industry leader ever since.

It has been written that there is nothing new under the sun. Sometimes it feels that way when the talk turns to social media and its impact on marketing as a whole and, more specifically, any Internet marketing efforts. Of course, every bit of marketing is going to be affected by a medium that encourages / celebrates shared information and the ability to color outside the lines. What’s not to like about a communication vehicle that allows the consumer to make decisions based on just about everything other than what is company generated propaganda?

Mediapost has picked up on a study conducted by StrongMail that examines the developing relationship between e-mail marketing and social media. Once again, when you read this kind of thing you probably say “Well, no kidding, duh.” But sometimes it’s good to see some numbers around the accepted theory.