Twitter belongs to a new breed of services, perhaps accidentally discovered, that win by doing less, not more. It’s a foundation upon which hundreds of new applications were built, yet, in itself, it is little more than an API for a simple one-to-many short message broadcast system. I, myself, have thrown my hands up in frustration and tried to find an alternative I can stick with - Pownce, Plurk, and countless others. Unfortunately, it seems, all these services are too good to be a viable alternative.

Seems like Worse is Better is infecting the web.

The idea of unilateral connections is an important one. People’s ideas of ’friendship’ differ and it’s not a good idea to, at the outset, ask a user to accept another person’s measure of what friendship is.

A site that visibly promotes how many ’friends’ you have turns friends into commodities, creating an economy where you are motivated to make as many friends as you can. That’s not a good idea because the utility of these sites suffer as social networks become too densely populated. Throw in the social implications of ’un-friending’ someone and you result in a cycle where the only way to solve the problem is to stop using the service and instead jump on to the ’latest’ social network where you can start with a clean slate. This is how we went from Friendster to Tribe to Orkut to MySpace to Facebook (with a few more or less along the way).

From blogoscoped

I’ve started to find alphabetically sorted menus boring. OK, they are optimised for findability, but surely eating/drinking out should offer a bit more mystique than deciding you want something, finding it alphabetically and then asking for it.

Signature dishes or drinks often get the top spots, but I can think of a few ways to sort the remaining offerings:

• price of ingredients / markup (helps profit)
• time to make (for cocktails - allows greater throughput)
• popularity (most user-friendly?)
• reverse chronological (to give new items a fair shot)
• random

Has anyone experimented with A-B testing on their menus? Steven Levitt thought he’d caught an example but it was just an old menu lurking.

Fred Wilson has an example of how one site (any ideas which?) takes it that one step further.

Brilliant.

I find it a little curious to see Buffett highlight his disinterest in investing in businesses without “an enduring ‘moat’ that protects excellent returns on invested capital” and comment that “if a business requires a superstar to produce great results, the business itself cannot be deemed great”.

In terms of Berkshire Hathaway’s minority-share investments few would question that Buffett is this superstar, but what about the many businesses it owns? With bungled acquisitions so common these days, BH is a wonder because it handles acquisitions so successfully, usually keeping the original management onboard, motivated and happy.

E-government in Dubai is surprisingly effective due to the eagerness of heads of department to impress Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al-Maktoumand and be showered with his praise.

The reason the second half the BH annual letter is usually so dull is because it isn’t written for anyone other than BH’s managers. This is where they get the chance to bathe in the praise they seek.

But when the charismatic, idolized Sheikh passes and a lesser - whose praise is not sought - takes over, what happens?

in Manhattan, a group of slightly older editors cleaned out their desks in a more conventional fashion at the offices of The New York Times Company. Most of them walked around in a state of shock: The Times’ board of directors had just voted to shut down the newspaper’s foundering Web division, after a loss of $30 million in less than a year

I guess that helps to explain the pay-wall madness to follow.

“We learned a thing or two,” said Time Warner Chairman Gerald Levin, only half-jokingly, at a recent raucous shareholder meeting. “Gangsta rap-yes. World Wide Web-no.”

That really doesn’t help explain the AOL-TW madness to follow.

The year? 1996

Light pollution

A month ago, the military banned MySpace but not Facebook. This was a very interesting move because there’s a division, even in the military. Soldiers are on MySpace; officers are on Facebook. Facebook is extremely popular in the military, but it’s not the SNS of choice for 18-year old soldiers, a group that is primarily from poorer, less educated communities. They are using MySpace. The officers, many of whom have already received college training, are using Facebook. The military ban appears to replicate the class divisions that exist throughout the military. I can’t help but wonder if the reason for this goes beyond the purported concerns that those in the military are leaking information or spending too much time online or soaking up too much bandwidth with their MySpace usage.