Something very interesting has just happened. After years of vying for attention, signing up people to follow him on his blog, on his twitter, on his facebook, Jason has decided to pull the plug on blogging. “I’m looking for something more acoustic, something more authentic and something more private. Blogging is simply too big, too impersonal, and lacks the intimacy that drew me to it.” Now, by bucking the conventional wisdom, and turning against his ...

One of the major issues hindering the growth of many Web services today is that users are not willing to pay. We don't want to pay for using their service, we don't want to pay for content, and we usually don't want to see or click through ads. Yet, free services, like Twitter, Google Reader, or any other Web activity aggregator have a cost of creating an infrastructure to support user growth. The more popular ...

Nate Westheimer’s piece “How Twitter Could Be Worth A Billion In A Year” got me thinking. Nate’s idea was that instead of using @Name to indicate a reply, you could p Name $amount. Instead of reply to Joe, Pay Joe some $. Nate is right: *is* a good idea, but it already exists. It was implemented by TextPayMe , founded in late 05, and acquired by Amazon in 2006. It’s still running, in fact. See ...