DISQUS

I preferred the icons from the aggregated services, even if they were relegated to a tiny spot at the end of the post.

Yelp always seemed useless and redundant compared to other sites. It looks like a crowded Yahoo wanna be. I did not find much use for it.

You're still confused about what Microsoft and Apple are. Microsoft is not in the hardware business, and thus is free to interoperate with a large number of platforms. Apple is stuck on one hardware platform, unless you count all those people stealing OS X to run it on their MSI Wind. Apple may have gained ground on Microsoft, but as long as they continue to remain "simple" for the masses, they cannot gain traction in the complex world of business. Yeah, yeah, there's plenty of places that might have a few Macs on the desk and an Xserve or two, but for the majority of enterprise systems, the Mac just isn't complex enough for that space.

If you're talking about just the consumer space, Microsoft is much bigger than just that market, but have fun with your iPhones and MacBooks. I know I will, but I'm not deluded enough to believe that will replace my Thinkpad at work, with all the flexible policy features that Windows can offer any industry steeped in regulatory requirements. I think Apple has some more ground to gain, but at some point it better realize that it is going to plateau against Microsoft in the consumer market especially in this economy. Nothing but adding complexity will be able to get them traction in some areas.

Maybe what they need is OS XI Pro and OS XI Home.

Fantastic example of people innovating with Twitter. Pirillo is a genius.

Visioneer makes some really nice, compact scanners that could be used for travel. Check out the RoadWarrior. Always keep a scanned copy on the laptop and back it up to the cloud, something like Mozy.https://mozy.com/?code=UXW2GB

Pavatar test

This is why I prefer to host my content on my own site rather than give those reigns to someone with some commercial or screwed up agenda. Even if it means slower access to it sometimes. I can't trust they'll always make the right decision and do no evil.

Needs to be an iPhone app.

I agree with Phillip.
Does it cost more for a disk spindle to spin while being 60% full or 1% full?

The answer may surprise you. It's the same damn thing!!

So if you, one of the more prolific Twitter users has around 15k messages and that adds up to about 3MB, then understand that on some really mediocre storage of 1TB, twitter can store that much for 300k prolific users. Mind you, this assumes that every prolific user spits out a message that is chock full at 160 chars. None of this takes into account the overhead of packing it into mySQL or other database.

I think users such as yourself are using less space than you think and I'd guess you can fit closer to 1M users in there. Since you're somewhere special on the bell curve, you can be sure that you're not representative of the average Twitter user, and the average user is taking up less than 10% of that space. Many have abandoned accounts or under utilize their accounts as we perceive it.

Seeing as how I as a home user (not an average one) have a server with a hardware-RAID mirrored 1TB array, I assume that a venture like Twitter has at least 5TB at their disposal and that this is not a problem for them. As storage prices continue to fall, you can be sure their storage will have grown while they now have to consider geographically diversifying their infrastructure to allow for quicker access times from around the globe, and a little redundancy in case of "events" like we see today in India.

The G1 looks like the old Palm Pilot with worse manufacturing tolerances. Ew.

I think it's not fair to compare Digsby with FriendFeed, since FF does so many things and D is only aiming to be there. Still, it's nice to see how Digsby is bringing it all together for the desktop. Still waiting for a FF app for iPhone.

As I've discovered over the years of losing my ability to have a coherent conversation in Spanish, the language I learned parallel to English, your language is like a muscle and must be exercised well. Classroom language is really weak. I could learn Chinese tomorrow in class, but without someone to exercise it with, it disappears quickly.

I'm at http://twitted.com/shokk

For many this will mean only what the iphone came with and that means old school web apps. So this means introducing those few to Twitter's web interface. What will you do to spread social networking to the blissfully unknowing?

I'd have to guess that a few people that bought iPhones were those that were caught up on the hype in the days before the release and probably haven't a clue what to do with it as far as the app store. I'm looking at getting one for the wife to get a family plan and she hasn't expressed much interest beyond AIM or Palringo and maybe some games. Social networking has no pull in that space. How does it grab hold of that market?

I find I only want to use Twitter on my iPhone because I want the camera and GPS to be a part of the equation. And the twitterlocal capabilty of Twinkle mixed well with all that. But there is a lot of room for improvement as one app usually has a feature the others don't, meaning I have all three of the above apps to do one thing or the other. And this is because Twitted doesn't natively support those things.

I think your observations are an indictment of social networking in general.

It's Apple platform. We're just renting them.

What limits does FriendFeed place?

So the important thing will be what you do next with this insight. My challenge to you is to set up a blog space somewhere else. Something like a hobbyist setup of Wordpress, out of anyone else's control, and use that as a clean slate. Let someone else take the control of commenting out of your hands, like Disqus. Do your non-business stuff there and see how that grows compared to your current space. If not, then you know the old style is dead, end of experiment, wipe the blog clean, and back to business you go.

I have high hopes for identi.ca since it attempts to create a merger of Twitter and FriendFeed. Since it links to ping.fm, it allows me to send the same updates to that crowd as well as any other social networks I'm a member of. But if it can provide the same amount of social network API hooks that FriendFeed and Ping.FM has accumulated, it could replace them all.

What all these services need are more automatic triggers, so they generate messages not just from IM sources, but from blogs and RSS feeds by just presenting those URLs.

Supertags sounds like the bundles at del.icio.us

And actually, your point about not finding LeWeb in a search is silly when the first page of results brought up Upcoming and LeWeb3.com. Remember those non-social network URLs that the rest of the internet is composed of? The ones without the flash music player and blinding, blinking graphics? Yes, I know that Facebook is exponentially less annoying than MySpace, but I feel that social networks have a limited power and you are making them seem to be so much bigger. Sort of reminiscent of the dot-com bubble days.

biggest repository of videos and photo on the Internet

It doesn't matter. The point is content content content. I have never seen anyone point to a Facebook video when passing a URL, even on Digg. It's always YouTube or sometimes Break.com.

The point is, that with a social network, you only care as far as your circle of friends. With something more loosely tied, like YouTube, you are more likely to care about that stranger's content in that non-social setting.

No more Ghost Rider or Daredevil!!