DISQUS

These might be fun to have : http://www.thinkgeek.com/feeds.html and http://feeds.feedburner.com/springwise

If you could only persuade http://www.madeinchina.com/ to have a feed ... globalization on steroids.

Isn't the Twitter problem the pulling together all the aggregate pages of who I'm following rather than sending the messages?

If so, one thought I had, couldn't this be pushed out to the client. So if I follow 200 people I make 200 hits on Twitter and sort them locally ... rather than expect Twitter to collect them and sort them internally. That would automatically hurt the people following 20000 others, but would make them more responsible for that. (They'd have to pull down and cache and process more locally).

Seems to me that you're using a lot of dismissive words like "utopian" and assuming that the government can't provide this kind of system.

I come from a country (the UK) who's government does reasonably OK for universal health coverage. It's not perfect and there are problems, and inefficiencies, but it's not utopian in the kind of dismiss-out-of-hand way. Most Europeans can claim something similar. Far from being a pipe-dream, universal healthcare, even universal housing(!) are perfectly feasable projects if a country *wants* them.

There seems to me to be something paradoxical about US conservatives who are so proud of their government's incompetence. I know this is a cheap shot but "why don't you vote for a better one?"

Seriously, the conservative rhetoric is constantly that government *mechanisms* can't solve problems (and yes, it's true, there's the danger of corruption, perverse incentives, excess bureaucracy and a slew of other issues to get over). But I don't see them going out of their way to find or support candidates who actually try to address these problems or improve the mechanisms.

At some point, you have to become suspicious that "government incompetence" *is* just a smokescreen behind which the conservative hides his true feelings of "I don't want to contribute to a social (or collective) welfare scheme".

Let's try a simple thought-experiment : imagine for a moment that the US government *was* competent enough to run a universal health care system (eg. at least as competently as the UK on a good day - so hard, but not impossible). And, you as a voter, were faced with a simple choice : provide universal health-care, but at a cost of higher-taxes, which, inevitable would pay for those too incompetent or lazy to pay for themselves.

Or not.

Which would you choose?

dave: responding to hardaway ... not you

since when was "holier than thou" morally equivalent (in badness) to "loutish"?

What kind of planet are people on who feel that "sounding a bit moralistic" is a much a turn-off as "being a jingoistic wannabe warmonger"?

*what* didn't work? Perhaps the idea of end-users renting their own online storage space? :-)

I wouldn't create an end-user product that requires users to set-up an extra account somewhere else. However easy it is in theory, you just *squared* the cognitive workload for the customer.

Better to do it behind the scenes on behalf of the users and charge whatever extra + markup you like.
This is what the user *wants* ... to have a system that just "works" not to save some pennies.

(That's the lesson from Apple, right)

-- phil jones

It's possible that Facebook *is* a political issue in the MoveOn sense if people are starting to use it to organize activism.

Maybe even though it's theoretically private space, it's becoming such an important part of their lives that it needs to be considered as a public utility. (Compare say, shopping malls as they replace public town-centres)

Cool ... I keep my Subversion repository on mine, and then check stuff out onto all my computers. Which seems backwards, but I think makes sense to me for stuff I don't want to keep on a publicly accessible web-server

Yeah, and Brazil ! We're getting impatient down here .. especially as exchange rates currently make buying stuff in dollars attractive ;-)