DISQUS

I think the key feature both need is Twhirl's use of the ping.fm API to cross-post to other services. That'll be the feature that keeps me using Twhirl.

If the boy didn't look about the size of an 8 year old...no, it would still be a complete travesty. Of course, the irony here is that The Sun is pointing to this as another example of why Britain is broken. Yet this young 'couple' are their key demographic: working class and dumb.

Is a paper that thrives on Page 3 girls and celebrity titilation in any position to point the finger?

I think essentially everyone thinks that there's a low barrier of entry - no cost to join and no experience required. Unfortunately, all the SMM invasion is doing is devaluing the Social Media platform. People are already tired of being friended by idiots looking to create a legion of followers.

I like the fact that you've got to participate, but the fact that your karma drops off if you've been absent for a day or so is a bugbear. Besides, there doesn't seem to be much advantage to having higher karma - like better exposure on the site or whatever.

Still, I love Plurk so much better than Twitter, it's got so much more character!

Gerards last blog post..Seth Godin on Marketing Shortcuts

In light of your recent post about copyright, I wonder how Hugh feels about not being given attribution for his monster on the side of the bus. An URL would have been nice!

I've often thought about having a blog war with someone. Possibly it's a matter of finding someone who's high profile enough and volatile enough to rise to the flame bait!

Ah, probably wouldn't anyway. I'm a lover, not a fighter...

Kylie Konnect? Are you serious? Dated naming conventions aside, I signed up for that service and it's nothing like a social networking site. All the standard features you'd expect to find are missing. The design is actually worse than MySpace and it's completely unintuitive.

I could launch a better social networking service with my eyes closed!

Why oh why do I get the impression that you're simply trolling with this hypothesis Robert? Could it be because SEOs will collectively knee-jerk at this? Could it be because Jason did a highly-successful bit of anti-SEO trolling within the last 6 months with this?

It's an interesting concept, and I'd love to see Google's dominance reduced somewhat. But those results link to mostly mainstream outlets - how are less established websites to get attention?

Plus, a number of the searches I did (on Mahalo) rely on results from Google News and Images for supplementary information. I don't think they're going to kill Google when they're legitimising them as a source of information.

I bought the DVD box set of the first series at the weekend and have been busily brainwashing the kids into watching it. It isn't proving difficult, they're lapping it up.

We'll be heading along to the cinema in 2010 then!

Hmmm. I read every comment on this thread so far, and there seems to be a hell of a lot of gun jumping going on.

In every argument about Microsoft and Open Source Software you get these massive extremes of opinion. OSS will kill Microsoft stone dead. Microsoft wants to shaft OSS and stifle innovation.

Instead of sitting at your computer with your knees jerking, why not get out and prove (to real people, not us geeks) how useful FOSS can be. Convince your pal with a small business to switch to Linux and OpenOffice. Or something like that. Start advocating OSS and people will use it.

My wife now refuses to use Windows, she's using Kubuntu with network storage on an MS Server. The more people who use Open Source, the less will fear it and it'll gain the traction it needs.

And Microsoft won't die overnight, if it dies at all. There are plenty of suits and resellers who seek the reassurance of that little multi-coloured flag that says Windows. Plenty of engineers who crave that MCSE for their CV.

Please get some perspective. And if you love Open Source, go out and help promote it, help establish it as a viable alternative.

Amen, Colin! I've been using ma.gnolia increasingly over the past few weeks and have started to use it to post interesting links directly to my blog with the postalicious plugin.

I think what Alex said above is true - ma.gnolia manages to raise the bar on social web apps, primarily because of its prettiness, but also because it has some great social networking and community features.

Looks like I'm a bit late to the party, but I have to side with Jeremiah on this - Dreamhost let me down in a big way and did to me everything they did to Andy.

Their customer support was abysmal, with vague and frustrating responses that told me nothing about what was wrong and why they'd taken down my site.

Now, this was my business website we're talking about here and it dropped off the Internet for roughly a week (email and all) because Dreamhost claimed my WordPress install was sending out viruses.

Each time I sent an email to them, it would take to the very limit of the response period before they'd get back to me, but with some confusing, non-committal response that DID NOT help to resolve my problem.

I resent the implication that by posting about negative experiences we're seen to be whining - I consider it fair warning to other potential customers!

Anyway, more fool me for sticking with them until this latest batch of problems which has seen more embarrassing downtime....

Robert, I completely hated FrontPage with a passion. It just seemed completely non-intuitive to me compared with Dreamweaver.

Having said that, I've been playing with the Visual Web Developer software recently, and if that's anything to go by Microsoft's finally got its act together on web development packages.