Early this year, executives at Philips, a global healthcare, lighting and consumer lifestyle business, initiated talks on selecting and deploying an enterprise 2.0 suite for its 100,000 employees worldwide.

Twitter has is banning third-party advertisements on its site in a move to control the monetization and integrity of the micro-blogging service. The company is spinning the move, saying it's building a firewall that blocks out advertisements that tarnish Twitter's coherent "timeline." But the real issue here is money, as always. Twitter wants your dough to support its Promoted Tweets platform, rather than allowing every straggler into the party.

Microsoft plans to start a small-scale pilot of a microblogging service aimed at business users that it has been experimenting with in Office Labs.

NewsGator's Social Sites, an enterprise social-networking complement to Microsoft's SharePoint Server 2007, now features Twitter-like microblogging capabilities tailored for workplace communications.

If you're thinking about implementing a microblogging effort for your workplace, here are 12 tools to consider.

Twitter's popularity may have exploded over the past year, but its feature set continues to evolve at a seemingly glacial pace. New users quickly realize that they need to shop around in the Twitter developer ecosystem for add-on software and Web-based services that fill in missing features and address the annoyances that the microblogging service's deficiencies present.