DISQUS

I can relate tot he political de-friending. I am all for open discussion but when people prove their ignorance about a topic or start spreading blatant lies about a candidate, it crosses the line and I will de-friend. I prefer to be surrounded by educated debaters.

I have also become far more choosy when accepting friend requests, which I highly recommend. Just because we have 50 friends in common does not mean we should be "friends", at least include a custom message detailing WHY you want to connect with me.

I was planning to watch on CNN.com since I cancelled my Comcast cable last month but I would much rather watch on Hulu.

I hope the feed doesn't have any of those pundits talking over it though.

Ok....so let's be very clear:

I can start a website, take all your content (which says "copyright"), upload it there, give you no credit, don't share revenue with you and you will think that it is fun?

Maybe I will actually try it.

If in fact you believe that "the concept of copyright as it is now and the concept of Internet aren’t compatible", then remove the line at the bottom of every page that says "Copyright 2006 - 2008 Mashable!" to back up your argument and lead the anti-copyright revolution.

Just like how email service providers made it possible to send email to each other i.e. became open and facilitated interaction, the new walled gardens known as social networking sites are following suit.

People still use Hotmail, Yahoo and Gmail to manage their email (or multiple email accounts) and these people aren't dumb enough to not learn from the past.

We will still use somebody's tool to manage our social communications via the web and OpenSocial is among the first to make that move. Will Facebook, MySpace, Plaxo or some new entrant be the one we use in the future - who knows - all we know is that walled gardens have limited a limited shelf life.

The new tools will become like email - open to information from outside but still managed within a specific tool.

You left out the idea of an acquisition by a bigger company that already has engineering minds. The VCs do eventually want their money + a return.

If scaling is not the problem, and just uptime, a freemium approach would make sense - free twitter accounts get x messages per month and paid members get x+y messages. That revenue can then go towards improving uptime (and scaling if needed).

The question is whether they think that they now have enough users to introduced paid services. Twitter is not exactly mainstream, mainly popular among the "digerati" in my opinion.

"Free lunch" does not compute in business because time is money and time is required to execute. The fact that recreational users of social media tools do not calculate the cost of their time does not mean that it is in fact free.

I hope that more PR firms get into social media and charge appropriately like Jeff above. I also hope that both they and advertising firms realize that you can serve ads on Facebook that target people based on their workplace.

I am running a campaign for my venture that targeted people at companies like The New York Times, Associated Press, MTV, Nike and others (the campaign focused on an article that called my venture the "closest thing to a Caribbean MTV on the web") and the click-thru response was good. Hopefully it has increased awareness of us within those organizations and could result in something big down the line (an article, an advertising contract, strategic investment, etc.).