There's an old saying: "you can never have too much money or friends." But that's before social networking came along. And while the adage for money still rings true, a shift maybe under way in how we define friendship. You can thank the web and social nets for that. The American…

Disclaimer: This blog post does not reflect future product announcements, technical strategy or advice from my employer. Disregard this disclaimer at your own risk. In my previous post Some Thoughts on Open Social Networks, I gave my perspective on various definitions of "open social…

When Google launched Gmail in 2004 many people wondered why it doesn't have folders. Gmail let you organize your messages using labels, which act like virtual folders: you can place a message in more than one folder.Every computer user understands the concept of folder:"In computing, a…

Google yesterday announced they’ll be rolling out a new look for their social network Orkut. It’s only being shown to a small portion of users right now. I can’t see it, for instance, but others now posted their screenshots, like the one below by Info-Mundo.net (Creative Commons…

And it's starting to happen right now, today in fact. I reported earlier on a new feed in Facebook, allowing notifications to be visible outside the wall.It's getting reallll interesting -- I've found some more RSS feeds in Facebook's UI. 1. Friends Status Updates. Look for the subscription link in…

CoComment had a good amount of time to get out ahead, but now the new blog comment startups are coming out in force. CoComment, you’ll remember, allowed users to track their comments across multiple sites and blogs via a bookmarklet, and (later) blog plugins. Disqus, from YCombinator-funded…

Dél-Koreában az emberek évente több mint 100 millió dollárt költenek avatarra, vagyis olyan kis rajzolt figurákra, melyeket kitehetnek az MSN Messenger ablakába, vagy feltehetnek a közösségi portálokra. Dél-Korea a jövő online világának boszorkánykonyhája, bár az ottani…

What a difference (less than) two years make! Here I was complaining about losing half the conversation …. two months later three comment tracking services debuted: coComment , MyComments and co.mments. Of these three, coComment developed decent traction. Fast forward a year or so, and we…

I am lending a new startup a hand by letting them showcase their new comment system on this blog.I don't know how much I am supposed to say about them, so I'll stay silent on them for now.You'll notice that this post and the previous post and any future posts will be using the new comment system.I…

Colorado-based startup incubator TechStars has launched their second company today, Intense Debate. We covered TechStar’s first company, MadKast, earlier this week.Intense Debate is a souped-up blog commenting system that adds a lot of features for publishers and commenters alike. Installing…

There’s a war being fought over ownership of your identity. Today Netvibes launches the Facebook Widget, which lets you view your Facebook notifications and friends within Netvibes. Data displayed includes links to your profile, friends and networks, and the usual counters for the number of…

Every day I dish up a number of topics, it's never clear to me which, if any, people will find interesting. Yesterday the topic that got the flow was lock-in and Web 2.0. There were times when that topic would go over everyone's head, but today it's much on-topic, as people commit more and more of…

Congrats to the lead investors, Union Square Ventures and the angels, and the entrepreneurs. I've been reading various posts and comments, and see a thread that's still out there. People doubt that there's a way to make money with Twitter. To that I say, they haven't been reading this blog. Now…

We've got social networks with lots of users, like MySpace, Beebo, Facebook, etc, and we've got open social networks like Marc Canter's People Aggregator and Marc Andreessen's Ning. But we really don't yet have an open social network with a lot of users. Facebook took a step in that direction when…

Amazing piece on Mashable, finally the issues we've been writing about here for 10-plus years are starting to surface in dramatic terms in the commercial space. To all vendors who are tuned in, look for ways you're keeping your users from managing their own data. The users are getting educated,…

Continuing the Status of the Platform story...5. You know I've been writing about Feedburner, and its potential of being a disaster for the RSS micro-industry. An email from Daniel McKeown this morning got me thinking, why don't we fix the problem? Maybe because most programmers have good log…

1. The great thing about the Internet was and is that it's the platform without a platform vendor. That's why it has been the engine of growth and innovation for so long, over thirty years now. There's no entity with eminent domain to forclose on a developer's relationship with customers. And none…

Jerff Atwood has a blog post entitled Google's Number One UI Mistake where he writes Google's user interface minimalism is admirable. But there's one part of their homepage UI, downloaded millions of times per day, that leaves me scratching my head: Does anyone actually use the "I'm…

Mike Torres has a blog post entitled A-listers don't always "get it" where he writes It used to be fun watching the "A-list" bloggers discover the obvious things that folks outside the U.S., little kids, and even big companies have been tracking for months; sometimes…

Today I'm waking up with the Smashing Pumpkins ringing in my ears and my ego search ringing off the hook. My throat and head are about 60-70% healed and looking back on my last couple of posts about turning off comments and declaring Facebook bankruptcy and asking: was my physical…

Forget Facebook. We're placing an open call to the web programming community to create a new social networking framework based on open standards.

Heh. The Pownce identity saga continues - with this post from the Chris Pirillo proxy (who doesn’t appear to be malicious, and raises good points): Why would anyone be the fake Chris Pirillo? Well, unless you are a Chris Pirillo, Leo Laporte, Robert Scoble or whoever… you will…

So Jason “no comments” Calacanis answers me, and others, back about his increasing dislike of Facebook and other social networks.First of all, for the record, Jason is right. Facebook sucks. Twitter sucks. Pownce sucks. Jaiku sucks. Kyte sucks. Etc and etc.Why? Because they take time.But…