We’ve created a nifty feature  here at pluURL to help gauge the popularity of certain content. Similar to the Facebook and Twitter buttons, which show you how many times something has been reposted, our calculated Social Pulse looks at a broader range of factors to determine a post’s popularity.

We look at the number of time a post has been retweeted, shared on Facebook, Dugg, as well as the publish date in determining a score. Sound confusing? It’s really simple. If you really like a post and want to move it’s score up, keep sharing on Facebook, Twitter, and Digg! Check out reallychill.org to see the Social Pulse in action.

Step one: you’ve synced your Twitter, Facebook, and Gchat.

Step two: Get on Cotweet.

I don’t know how CoTweet came on our radar, but it’s a game-changer. Whether you run a startup with three college kids subsisting on Ramen or you’re a marketing director for a Fortune 500 company, CoTweet is the perfect Twitter application for a growing business.

CoTweet allows you to take customer engagement to the next level. You can assign certain people to Twitter duty, monitor your brand in Twitter search results, and make assignments for people using Twitter.

Check it out and let us know what you think.

Just because we could do something, does not mean we should do something (It’s kind of like that guy, in class who always raises his hand).  It sounds so obvious yet it amazes me how many times we repeat this mistake over and over again.

Whenever there’s a great idea, we work with extremely talented people who can preform multiple roles. I can say from experience, that just because I can design doesn’t mean I should be the designer;  just because I can develop doesn’t mean I should be the developer, etc etc.

Because of his/her skill set, an entrepreneur is  is well-suited to wear many hats. I tell this to people so often they are probably rolling their eyes while reading this.

I almost want to say that the entrepreneur’s dilemma is wearing too many hats. To clarify, micromanaging is every entrepreneur’s fatal flaw. He/she feels compelled to hold on to every part of the operation. When I was in college I ran the student media conglomerate (Slope Media) that I started very inefficiently, because I tried to control all the processes.

Since we are young, we feel that we can always take on infinite projects by simply working longer and harder. However, at the end of the day, working infinitely results in the ultimate sacrifice: complete loss of time. Time to plan, time to focus, and time for self-reflection. You can’t raise time from a venture capitalist no matter how many times you pitch.

The ability to create more time then almost becomes more valuable than the ability to create more capital. Focusing one’s time on bringing in new business or growing an existing business is ia highly sought after assets that can’t be raised.

Good resources on entrepreneurship:

• Guy Kawaski – http://www.guykawasaki.com/
• Tim Ferris – http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/

Earlier this week, Jonny wrote a blog post on the topic of group/small business collaboration tools. These are some of the vehicles we are starting to implement in our business processes and procedures to not only work more efficiently as an organization, but to create more time to grow and create new business opportunities. (Read the article on wiggio, google docs, deskaway and basecamp)

Today, we put up another post about jobs. We are asking you the reader, our friends, our family to refer talented people to help us learn from our mistakes of the past. Instead of wearing many hats (and leaving the office every day at 3am) we are trying to define our processes and procedures to scale, even if it means letting go a little.

If you have any input, suggestions or resources, feel free to give us feedback by leaving a comment or sending us a tweet @pluURL

Not only is being paperless trendy in this era, it’s absolutely necessary when one considers how rapidly information must be transferred from machine to machine. If you’re working in California but based in New York City and you’ve got a team in Austin, TX and Bangalore, India handling development while outsourcing manufacturing to the Philippines – well, things can get complicated to say the least.

Here are a few online collaboration tools that will save you valuable time and money if used the right way.

• Google Docs – Forget Word and Powerpoint. With line-by-line text editing for spreadsheets and presentations visible to all collaborators, Google Docs are fast and reliable. Companies can easily manage inventory and write business plans even if two founders are on opposite sides of the world.

• Basecamp - Developed by agile software company Signal 37, Basecamp is nothing short of a lifesaver for small businesses. You can create customized projects, add companies, time track to-do lists … plus templates are completely customizable. My favorite part of this service is that you can make certain elements of group projects private. Although the free trial only lasts thirty days, Basecamp offers very reasonable packages depending on how big your business is.

• Wiggio - Super catchy name (first part of the word stands for “Work In Groups”) and a rapidly growing favorite among student groups, Greek organizations, intramural teams, and clubs. The platform also integrates SMS incredibly smoothely, which allows all members of a group to receive updates on their mobile devices.  Rumor has it that video conferencing will be released in the next iteration of the site, which could be a huge hit.

• DeskAway - We received this recommendation from Twitter and immediately dug it. The interface is very welcoming and tools like graphs and charts make time-tracking simple very visual. The packages are affordable and collaborative (from Free Ninety Nine to $99/ month) .

If you have any other great group collaboration tools that should be on here, drop us a comment or send us a tweet.

Check out this really cool social media tool called twitter2talk. It’s an easy-to-use web service that allows you to sync your Google Talk status with your Twitter status. (links at the bottom)

Now you may ask yourself, why would I ever want to do that? The answer is simple:  increasing your social media presence even among your circle of friends, is a simple and effective way to measure gains across social networks.

Keeping your company / blog / website / organization in the conversation is an effective social media strategy. It allows you to gain followers across your Facebook business/fan page and Twitter followers, which means more eyeballs on your brand. We’ll follow up this post with some good social media tools to sync Twitter and Facebook.

It’s important to keep your message consistent and pervasive amongst the various social media platforms.

• Twitter2talk (documentation | application) – a web service that allows you to sync twitter and your google status
• Twitter – a web app that allows you to send instant messages to millions of followers around the world
• Gmail & Google Talk – Gmail is a web based email application from Google. Through this web application, you can also use the free instant message service google talk to communicate (voice and video chat) with other users with google accounts.