ashot

diaspora

when I type an email I have an expectation that only I and the recipient will see the email.

similarly, a vast majority of these people are not intending to broadcast these updates into the public space (non-anonymously with a photo of their face attached next to the update)

I personally don't have any moral outrage over this, but that is the issue. You've built up an expectation of privacy with people and then took it away without enough user messaging. One dialog if I remember correctly, saying something along the lines of "Share your updates with everyone." (what does "everyone" even mean?)

tldr: you switched the defaults on people and they haven't realized it.

It should be a unified, filterable timeline of calls, voicemails, and txts (look ma, a newsfeed!)

I communicate with people (often the same people) through multiple mediums throughout the day. The most important information to me is what occured in the last 10 minutes, hour, day. why should I have to manually switch between types?

Open up one screen, flip through unread messages, voicemails, and calls.

They are not a creative company (or as Jobs would have it they have no taste - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=upzKj-1HaKw ).

Their business does not revolve around creating new things but about copying and improving things that already exist in the market. And to be fair, this strategy has worked out quite well for them so far, so why would they change course?

So ultimately I think thats what this is like a Google Base + computation where they have added (hopefully) enough of the core to push it over the hill.

A place to put structured data where it can be fully leveraged minimal effort from the data provider.

I know someone else replied to this, but just had to add my 2 cents here. This is in fact flash's biggest advantage: how quickly they are able to push new versions out to 98% install penetration. The only cross-platform development environment in the world which has the luxury to consistently push out new features on a yearly basis. As long as there are new features to be pushed flash will have a space. Though that is a question, what is left? They are running out. Perhaps hardware accelerated 3d.

certainly not easy, and not any easier than it was before as the web is much larger

there is also freshness/timeliness which is the most difficult aspect and is becoming more and more important as more data is added to the web faster (one area where googlebot kills yahoo/msn)

what is the logical framework for this? at first I thought you could only have one emphasized word per statement, but though its a bit more nuanced but you can also have two at a time (ie "my" and "money")