Today,  Invoke co-founder Ryan Holmes and HootSuite community wrangler Dave Olson are in Seattle, representing HootSuite at the TweetHouse 140TC conference.

If you’re unable to attend the event today, check out the UStream video feed.  If you ARE attending, make sure you keep an eye out for Owly, the HootSuite mascot, and say hi to Ryan and Dave.

HootSuite is a silver sponsor at the event, announced February 26th on TC140’s blog, and Ryan will be speaking on the following panel at 4:30 pm.

4:30pm – 5:30pm
License to Tweet: Applications and Services To Die For
Panelists: Kathy Gill, DL Byron, Ricardo Rabago, Ryan Holmes,Dan Shapiro Moderator: Steve Broback

Twitter is more than just 140 characters. Twitter is a platform that grows more powerful every day, as developers, entrepreneurs, and people with too much time on their hands create thousands of tools and services that do everything from sending direct messages to tweeting on behalf of your houseplants.

This panel of Twitter elites will share their favorite Twitter applications and services, and how these apps help them draw value from the Stream.

Track what people are saying about TweetHouse, 140TC conference:

Last week, Invoke was featured in a CBC segment profiling the impact social media has had at the 2010 Olympic Games, and the role it is predicted to play in the upcoming 2012 Olympic Games in London. The CBC segment featured our video conversation tool, Vidrollr, the freshest social web application out of the Invoke laboratory since HootSuite.

In the clip you see Sian Pairaudeau, a mighty project manager here at Invoke (and maker of delicious cheesecake), give an overview of Vidrollr’s functionality. Developed by Invoke, Vidrollr is a small, brandable space that facilitates short video commenting, compared by Theresa Lalonde of the CBC as the video version of Twitter. Diverse in its uses, Vidrollr was a perfect fit for the 2010 Olympic Games, allowing visitors to record their impressions of Vancouver and the 2010 Winter Olympics. Expect to see the seamless integration of the Olympic Games and video commenting online in London in 2012, as spectators in there and abroad share their impressions with the rest of the world.

Video commenting is just one of the many things we’re excited to see transpire during the 2012 Olympics. Indeed, if Vancouver 2010 has taught us anything, it’s that social media and technology go hand in hand with the Olympics, inspiring each other to accomplish great feats of innovation.

Watch the clip here.

For Christmas, employees at Invoke received a welcome gift: Kindles. While some of us were skeptical about this new-fangled contraption, a few weeks of use have made converts of us all… and we aren’t the only ones. Due to the Kindle, Amazon sold more e-books during Christmas than print books.

Apple’s pending iSlate promises to encourage further adoption of tablet PCs — and may even signal a shift away from netbooks. As Apple is one of the few computer manufacturers that has not hopped onto the netbook bandwagon, this may be the product that bridges the gap between the iPhone and the MacBook. We will not speculate on how the iSlate may be a “game changer”, but we do think, based on our experience with the Kindle, that tablets are here to stay.

We can’t help but wonder how tablets could change social media. Whenever a disruptive technology disturbs the media status quo, it also changes how people interact with each other. Here’s how we think tablets could impact social media.

How the Form Complements the Function

There’s a reason the average blog post is less than 500 words: reading text on a monitor is hard on the eyes. While many of us do that for 8 hours a day (and sometimes longer), few find the experience more pleasurable than a book, thanks to glare, flicker, and other maladies of the back-lit screen. Moreover, 16:9 widescreen format has always lent itself better to movies than text. On smartphones, messages must be shorter. An iPhone’s small screen means lots of scrolling for big blocks of text.

Tablets hit the sweet spot for reading. They are small enough to make for easy scanning, yet large enough for making scrolling (or “page-turning”) a snap. Most of them use a technology called “e-ink” to make reading easier, and take away notorious flicker that plagues back-lit monitors.

In addition to the publishing sector, education will be the first industry profoundly affected by tablets. Tablets will cut students’ costs and dramatically reduce their physical load. And one can only begin to imagine the impact on libraries, which will move increasingly online. These examples just scratch the surface. Who knows how tablets could affect hospitals, law offices, or any profession that requires massive consumption of text?

Where does social media fit in?

The tablet form factor is an obvious boon for long-form content. It would therefore find an appreciative userbase among professionals who use many documents. However, since most tablets will be equipped with wireless Internet, there’s no reason users should remain passive readers.

Imagine students being able to send study notes to each others’ kindles, and then be able to provide further insight. Picture chefs not only perusing recipes, but adding their own critiques: “This one’s good, but too much salt.” Because tablets complement text so well, this may strengthen online dialogue — and may even improve well known social sites like Wikipedia that are already text-heavy.

Finally, if the Kindle is indicative of a broad trend, future tablets will probably implement an iPhone-style app store. What this means is that developers will inevitably build social media apps that complement a tablet’s function. Just as apps like Foursquare are built specifically for mobile phones, so this will be the case for tablets. Want to organize a virtual book club? It could be just a social media app away.

Update: Apple has announced their tablet today — and controversially have called it the iPad. As expected, major publishers have signed on. And it is confirmed the iPad uses the same app store as the iPhone.

For nine years, the Canadian New Media Awards have recognized and celebrated the accomplishments of the nation’s digital media movers and shakers. We’re happy to announce that CNMA has selected Invoke Media as a finalist in its Best Use of Social Media category. Invoke Media is being recognized for creating the Twitter client Hootsuite, which has been a runaway social media success since its launch in December 2008.

The honour falls closely on the heels of Invoke Media being selected as a finalist for the prestigious Groundswell Awards, in recognition of the social media campaign we ran for the HootSuite 2.0 launch. Hosted by the internationally recognized technology and market research company, Forrester Research Inc, the Groundswell awards recognize the most outstanding social technology applications with a unique focus on business performance. We were in good company and we salute our fellow finalists, including but not limited to the Bank of America, Adobe, and MasterCard.

A big thank you to Forrester Research and the Canadian New Media Awards for recognizing the strides Invoke Media has taken in social media over the past year.

We are pleased to announce that HootSuite has been recognized by Backbone Magazine and KPMG as one of the Top 20 Web 2.0 companies driving innovation and changing the way we use the internet.

Upon reviewing HootSuite, Michael O’Connor Clark, VP at Thornley Fallis Communications, says,

“Once again Canadian innovation in the social media universe blows my mind. HootSuite is one of those solutions that’s so good you don’t really realize how much you need it until you start using it.”

All we can say is thank you! (Although we are fighting back a mischievous smile, anticipating the reaction to what the new HootSuite has to offer in the very near future.)

To read the entire article and to view the entire list of ranking companies, go here. The print edition of this article will also be available in the July/August issue of Backbone Magazine and in the Globe and Mail on July 28th, 2009.