Facebook has had an update feature similar to Twitter for a while. Now Facebook has a feature that lets users add feeds from other web services like Flickr and del.icio.us — just like FriendFeed. From a technology perspective, Twitter and FriendFeed are now reducable to Facebook features. Even if those two apps are currently more robust than their equivalent Facebook features, there’s nothing to stop Facebook from copying them in their entirety.

Think video is the future of online media? Broadband revolution, right? Apple perfecting the digital video experience? Well, not if everyone decides to embrace that future all at once. Time Warner Cable is experimenting with caps on broadband usage, which means too much movie downloading and suddenly you’re paying $30 per movie.

A site's signup page is the second most important page on a site (the most important is the home page itself) because this is where you're asking for committment. Everyone worries about the home page (and still don't do a good job), but most companies do a poor job with the signup page. For example, HAMweather's is aesthetically-challenged, and Last.fm's doesn't convey enough information. This article about signup pages by Tim Bednar is a good read. His list of important signup-page elements is:

When Apple launched the iPhone exclusively on AT&T’s crumby edge network — and I refused to buy one for that reason — I predicted that Apple’s real endgame was to break the wireless carriers’ stranglehold on handsets, so that Apple could sell iPhones on any network. Sure enough, Verizon just announced that next year it would allow any phone — and any application on any phone — to be used on its network.

A couple months ago I wrote that the mobile web sucks, based on my own user experience that didn’t seem to match the hype. Some people agreed, but a lot of people defended, passionately, the mobile web. Today the New York Times published some interesting data:

NYTimes.com wasn’t the first traditional media brand to aggregate third-party content — and it certainly won’t be the last. But the New York Times, once considered the national newspaper of record, represented one of the last bastions of the traditional media approach to content, i.e. we produce it ALL ourselves.

Facebook has a shot at being the first web company since Google to build a really big BUSINESS, not just a big user base. But Facebook has a number of vulnerabilities, which are worth pondering as we also ponder its huge potential. I’ve written before about some of these vulnerabilities, such as the risk that Facebook will lose the sense of exclusivity that once propelled it, or the risk that specialized professional networks will steal away business users. Here are two more of Facebook’s vulnerabilities:

Here are the top-ten Leopard tips from my friends, Adam Engst et al, at Take Control Books. They’ve already released five ebooks to help people upgrade to Leopard. Take Control publishes minor updates for free, so the authors can revise their books on the fly. These guys are the experts, but I have two Leopard tips as well, more about them later.

This quote is from futurist Paul Saffo in an Economist article that makes a contrarian case for Facebook, in part by arguing that as social networks grow, they will eventually encounter the inverse of Metcalfe’s law, becoming LESS valuable with each new user rather than more valuable.

A few weeks ago Chris Brogan published a list of the 100 blog topics that he wished people would cover. One of them was, "How Twitter Improved My Blog," and I accepted the challenge to write something along these lines. (For those of you who are unfamiliar with Twitter, you can read "The Tao of Twitter," "Newbies Guide to Twitter," or "Ode to Twitter.") Here is my answer to Chris's request.