Last week, twitter announced an easy-to-install and lightweight Tweet Button that allows publishers to make it easy for users to share a link to their content on Twitter. Thousands of sites have implemented the Tweet Button already.

But what if you go to a site that doesn’t have a Tweet Button? Have no fear. Today, they’re making available a Tweet Button Bookmarklet that allows you to tweet a link with your own commentary from anywhere on the web. You just need to drag and drop the Bookmarklet into your browser’s bookmark bar.

Like the Tweet Button, it shortens links automatically. If there’s a Twitter account listed on the site, it also may suggest users to follow. To install the Bookmarklet, visit this page and drag the “Share on Twitter” link to your bookmark bar on any browser.

Google will kill off Google Wave, they told in a blog post. It was a technically very inspiring web app which, however, arrived without any particular and clear use case. This caused not only interface usability problems (Wave was good at allowing you to do a lot of things at once, but it often wasn’t really good at anything in particular, e.g. plain chat when needed). It also caused social frictions as people were using the tool with different, colliding expectations.

Google now says that despite wins and numerous fans, “Wave has not seen the user adoption we would have liked.” They won’t continue develop Wave as a stand-alone tool, but keep on using and extending its technology in other products. Well, it looks like this product at least had a chance to proof or disproof itself. Other products, like Google’s 3D world Lively, were cancelled after just mere months.

Today Mozilla announced the launch of the Social Media Toolkit.

The Mozilla Social Media Toolkit is a set of tools that allows you to leverage social media to market Mozilla and Firefox in your region and beyond.  The toolkit contains everything you’ll need from best practices, tips and tricks, to design assets for both Facebook and Twitter.

Are you a Mozillian that has a community or localized Mozilla/Firefox social media account?  Or are you interested in setting one up?  Then this toolkit is for you!

Go check out the toolkit! together we can see an increase in the Mozilla social media space!

Google is always obsessed with speed. Their mantra is faster = better. This is true for their Google Voice mobile apps as well. When you want to make a call, your phone should connect you as quickly as possible, whether you’re calling via Google Voice or not.

Today they are launching an enhancement to the Google Voice mobile app on Android and Blackberry phones, which makes placing calls much faster. They call this feature “direct access numbers.” Here’s how it works:

Until today, the Google Voice app had to make a request to the Google Voice server every time you wanted to make a call to send us the phone number you wanted to dial. Then the call would be connected via a Google Voice access number. With direct access numbers, Google assign a unique phone number to every person you call. This means that they no longer need to use your data network to access the server each time you make a call, so calls will be placed much faster.

The updated Android app is available from Android Market starting today. For Blackberry users, you can download the app by visiting http://m.google.com/voice from your mobile device. You will need a valid Google Voice account to use the app, and at this time, Google Voice is available in the US only.

This is a big day for Yahoo! Messenger. Yahoo! announced that they’ve opened up the Yahoo! Messenger platform for developers. This exciting SDK will allow developers to use the Yahoo! Messenger platform to create innovative new applications and services.

Yahoo! tried to make their SDK as simple to use as possible. They’ve exposed a new REST API for the Yahoo! Messenger platform — the same API that they use with thei own products. So they know that it’s rock solid. In fact, all you need is a little knowledge of HTTP and JSON and you’ll be up and running in no time, no matter what programming environment you’re using. The SDK contains all keys Yahoo! Messenger features that you’ve come to expect, including real-time presence, contact-list management, instant messaging, file transfers, and user-image management.

Please make sure you read the documentation that Yahoo! included. This document provides best practices, guidelines for using the service, Messenger logos (including our beloved Smiley), and test cases to make sure your application is working properly.

Finally, note that they’re rolling out the SDK in most of Asia, as well as India, initially. The reason we chose this region is the dynamic nature of instant messaging in this market. There are some crazy and wonderful things with Yahoo! Messenger coming out of this corner of the world.

For those of you in the rest of the world don’t worry; we have plans to roll out this program on a larger scale very soon.

Here’s a list of handy links:

• Yahoo! Messenger IM SDK
• Yahoo! Messenger IM SDK Developer Terms of Use
• Yahoo! Messenger IM SDK User Guide