The ‘net is ablaze after the announcement that MSFT is to consume YHOO at a 61% premium on a cash & share unfinanced basis. This will generate considerable interest for the continued war on the GOOG.

In principle, this seems like a sensible aggregation strategy for Microsoft. Yahoo are bleeding right now, they shed jobs and there is a general sense that the company was wracked by doubt. The question is whether Redmond can really be their knight?
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The hook that got me into really using Twitter was reading celebrity twitters, specifically Robert Scoble. It’s a new level of knowledge to be able to get constant updates from thought-leaders with an understanding that there is an informality associated with tweets that does not arise in more fully-thought-out blog posts.

I have since moved to a rather uncomfortable write-on-one, read-on-another model. The real power of a social app is in the graph - the members and their links. However, I am using twitter feeds to shoehorn the better posting features of Pownce into the graph of twitter.

Pownce has better features, though it is still not complete. I really think it needs some sort of markup that will permit inline linking, or at least bold,italics, and so on. The original 140-character text-message style of twitter was a great way to get people into the nanoblog mentality, and I get it now : I want slightly more room so I can post links and thinks in a way that makes use of the positional context of the text I am producing (you know, that thing Tim Berners-Lee mentioned: HyperText?).

Pownce’s closed nature is starting to hurt for me, and the flood away from Jaiku (as demonstrated by Leo Laporte) shows that you need an open graph to let things really work well.

Oh, and if the Pownce people are listening, can we get public threading as well? Following conversations like that is what makes twitter rock.

Robert Scoble talks with Dr. Irving Wladawsky-Berger about the implications of avatars and appearance in virtual worlds and the implications for cross-site identity.
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