DISQUS

Could someone explain the rationale for placing the posting field at the bottom? Personally, I prefer the top -- or a breakout. (Then again, I prefer groups and bookmarklets that instantly add trimmed URLs to the posting field.)

Anti-design is design by omission.

Xerox comes to mind: A trademark that, despite being fought for by its owners, has also become a generic noun and verb in common usage. "Twitter" and "twitter" can co-exist, I think, as tweeters continue to tweet. (Just look out for "spit," or spam in Twitter.)

Wish this service existed before the wife and I bought a timeshare. Would have saved us a lot of money. ;-)

Personal apps may
not get much
traction, but
corporate apps
could. I see a
market for companies
to offer news,
multimedia,
commentary,
networking, etc. in
a true branded
iPhone application
(and not just an app
wrapper for a
website). Consumer
products could
deliver weekly
coupons and feature
videos of how to use
their products. Fast
food chains could
include games based
on their characters,
location-based
services, or
nutrition info. Auto
makers could format
their websites to
deliver details
information on each
of their models,
connect you with a
sales rep, and -- if
you buy one -- start
tracking your
maintenance and
repairs. The list
goes on.

Perhaps too many people are trying to watch the live event, but it won't buffer the video at our office. Guess we'll have to wait until it's done to learn the details.

A co-worker versed in social media disagrees. She said just now: "The new Facebook design is too big. It has too many tabs. And it's too hard to find stuff."

Facebook's real challenge is the same as any other Web service or software app: Make information easy to find and tasks easy to complete. Perhaps, one day, Facebook will offer a wizard that says, in effect, "Here's a list of everything you can do here. Drag items in the order you find useful and we'll configure a start page with your needs in mind. Change it later however you want, because it's all about you."

As for me, I think the new version is superior, but they're not done simplifying. Their nomenclature is still obtuse ("Boxes," Wall-to-Wall"), confusing ("Updates" vs. "Notifications," "Profile" vs. "Your Name"), and redundant ("Facebook" and "Home" go to the same place), for example.

Facebook would do well to create a video showing how to accomplish the same tasks the old way and new way side-by-side. Part of my job is to help train clients to use social media and social networking services. Without exception, everyone has at least one gripe about the challenge of completing a simple task. Facebook, in my opinion, is STILL too cluttered with similar functions in different areas. We'll see, though, whether they can weather the inevitable storm that accompanies any major change in workflow.

I see a lot of bloggers and reporters sharing bookmarks through Twitter, but it doesn't organize anything like Delicious.

Unfortunately, Delicious doesn't store pages for searching, offer commenting by others, or provide offline reading. FriendFeed is trying to foster conversations around shared items, but audience size pales in comparison to Digg, Yahoo or Facebook.

The social aspects of sharing articles and sites seem like a perfect fit for media outlets to take up. Desperate to gather audiences around their content, the largest publishers might do well to come together and popularize an open service that helps any site feed readers back to them for discussion, research and storage.

TypePad and del.icio.us, please.

Robert Scoble (or anyone else), how in the world do you manage to follow all the comment threads in which you participate? Here, Twitter, FriendFeed and dozens of blogs and news sites? I've tried coComment and co.mments.com, but neither seem to gather and organize the threads effectively for me.

Apologies if this has been brought up earlier or is easily answered elsewhere, but why doesn't AIM, YIM, MSN Messenger, iChat, Jabber, or some other established instant messenger service just add posting and commenting features to compete with Twitter? Seems like a natural extension of their current services, and perhaps easier to turn IM into a lightweight CMS than a lightweight CMS (such as Twitter's original architecture) into IM.

Searching for that Twitter-like, data hub-like, comment tracking-like, conversation aggregator/poster.

Tom, typing with your elbows seems to be quite the challenge. I hope your hands heal from whatever industrial accident prevents them from properly capitalizing, spacing and punctuating your blog spam.

PS: Thanks, Adam, for the report. It's a challenge to track reputations online and Summize sounds like a service worth trying.

Looking forward to learning how Google Gears may eventually help make this a potent competitor to Microsoft Office. Our company does less than a quarter of our productivity work in the cloud, but announcements like this could change that quickly. I'm curious how Google Apps treats the data companies store. What rights does Google retain to access individual accounts or files?

As the IT manager for a 25-person professional services firm, I'm looking for ways to facilitate collaboration, communication and information gathering -- while reducing mental overhead and tech complexity. There's certainly a business case for client-based or web-based interface that aggregates feeds and conversations while integrating presence, blogging and sharing tools. I'd add another one: email. Our employees live out of their inboxes, and I would like to see a system that integrates all of it elegantly so they can read up and join in effectively.

As I guide more coworkers and customers into social media services, I like the idea of having a name for the role, other than "the IT guy who signs up for all the Web stuff." Regardless, I get all warm and fuzzy every time I see someone I help go "a-ha!" and realize how a certain tool or workflow can get stuff done faster, smarter and/or easier. Thanks Nick for the great article. (Just kidding, Tony.)

I'd like to see FriendFeed take it a step further and allow comments to or from any conversation to be aggregated as an RSS feed as well as posted back to the original source. Make it a lot easier to track conversations and improve the quantity and quality of discourse.

Perhaps I've set up FriendFeed incorrectly, but I can't see the utility of it within a feed reader -- where I still live half the day -- when every post headline reads: "Robert Scoble posted two messages on Jaiku" or "Dave Winer posted a message on Twitter" or "You bookmarked a page on del.icio.us." I'd prefer to see the headline or truncated version of the message itself with a simple indication of what kind of message I might expect by clicking to see more. I'm using NetNewsWire to follow the feed. Personally, I'm looking for tools that remove distractions and add clarity and comprehension. FriendFeed might help, and I'm probably missing something, but I'm just not seeing a large leap in productivity here.

Amen to that.