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Those who know me well (or even a little for that matter) know that I’m head over heels in love with BlackBerry® Messenger (BBM™). You also know that I’m a pretty big baseball fan. Well, put those things together and you get the inspiration for this week’s Top 3 Tuesday: Top Three Uses for BBM Groups. You might be asking yourself, what does baseball have to do BBM Groups? The answer might surprise you:

1. Coordinating groups of people. BBM Groups is possibly one of the best ways to get a group of people together in one place, without physically meeting. With the ability to chat in real time with your selected group, it’s simple and fun way to connect. You can also share calendars, lists and even photos. For me, the ability to create lists is among the best features because you can assign a task to a group member and track completion. Planning a party? Assign someone to bring the balloons, or the cake. Working on a project? Assign the completion of needed documents and track everything in the group calendar. Getting people together using BBM Groups couldn’t be easier.

2. Sharing the moment. Have something that you want to share with a group of your BBM contacts, but not the whole list? Creating a BBM Group is a great way to do this. One of the best examples I’ve come across is a friend who used a BBM Group to keep us all up to date on their pregnancy. They made the announcement in the chat, then added the due date to the calendar, and finally shared pictures of the baby – all within the group. (It was a girl – congrats!)

3. Clubs and Teams. I’ve been playing recreational baseball this summer, and we use BBM Groups as our main hub for the team. At the beginning of the season, we added all our games to the group calendar so nobody would forget. We share photos and memes for inspiration on game day, and use the chat all week long to coordinate impromptu practices and make carpooling arrangements to the diamond. We even use the list function to keep track of who’s on sunflower seed duty and make changes to the batting order. Now, we can focus on swinging for the fences.

If you haven’t already explored BBM Groups, you might find that it can be used as your personal coordinator. Do you have an interesting way you use a BBM Group in BlackBerry Messenger? Be sure to tell us all about it in the comments.

Calendar with social integration

Like the new Messages app that includes a universal Inbox, so you can conveniently manage all your email in one place, the new Calendar app in PlayBook OS 2.0 allows you to manage all your appointments and events in one place – including the ability to manage both work and personal (Gmail®, Hotmail®, Yahoo!®) appointments and Facebook® events (never miss a birthday again!). Of course, the Calendar app offers the common features that you’ve come to know and love, but it now also includes some compelling new features to help you organize your day:

• People View: In addition to the traditional Day, Agenda, Week, Month views, you can now view your day based on the people you’re meeting with. This view provides additional information on your contacts pulled from LinkedIn®, including where you’ve met in the past.

• Visual Cues: You’ll be able to more quickly scan and manage your calendar at a glance. For example, the Calendar app provides visual cues that identify days that have more appointments than those that are relatively light. For example, when you view your calendar at a glance, dates with many appointments will show up in a larger font while the dates in smaller fonts have fewer appointments. If you have a lot of appointment conflicts, a red highlight identifies the conflict so you can’t miss them!

• Zoom in to a detailed view: From the “Week” view, you can go directly to a day’s calendar with ease. Simply tap any day to zoom into the details of that day, including the meetings you have scheduled and the people you will be meeting with.

Contacts: Your social hub

Your contacts are more than just an address and phone number, so why treat it like a rolodex? The new Contacts app acts as a social hub that helps you maintain a complete and current view of your contact’s social status.

• Contact Linking: The majority of people use more than email and phone to stay in touch with their personal and professional contacts — Facebook, Twitter®, and LinkedIn are growing exponentially in their popularity and usability. The Contacts app allows you to automatically bring all these distinct social profiles into a single people-centric view in your address book – meaning you can set up one contact name and integrate all of their contact and social profile information into one profile. You also have the option to reduce duplicate entries, and manually link or de-couple your contacts from social profiles. Watch this demo to learn more.

• Status Updates and People Views: Using information gathered from Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, the Contacts app lets you see your contact’s recent social status updates and common friends.

• Meetings, Places, and News: Be prepared before walking into that meeting. For each of your contacts, you can view past (and future) meetings with that person, see the places you’ve met previously, and read news about their company.

• Favorites and Video Chat: Mark your top contacts as a “favorite” for quicker access, and sort your address book by those contacts who also use BlackBerry PlayBook Video Chat.

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We built the BlackBerry PlayBook tablet OS 2.0 email, calendar and contacts experience with the goal of providing the best tools for managing your busy life across all of your networks. I’m so proud of the team for pulling it off, and we’re just getting started! We have a ton of ideas, and look forward to getting your feedback.