Many people are happy to graze Twitter, but the ‘super nodes’ that are the ‘social editors’ need a much more robust way to get content: RSS. If you like RSS is the weapon of choice for the content apex predator, rather than the content herbivores.

via Social Editors and Super Nodes – An Appreciation of RSS – John Battelle’s Searchblog.

This also points to the need for new platforms that allow these media companies to syndicate their content.  Proliferation of individual apps or channels is not the new model. Google/Yahoo news isn’t the new model – they’ve been surpassed by Facebook already. Community sites like Digg and Reddit are not even in the running.

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Here’s a basic list of questions to consider when selecting a vendor:

A platform is a technology or product upon which many other technologies or products are built. Some platforms are controlled by a single corporation: e.g. Windows, iOS, and Facebook. Some are controlled by standards committees or groups of companies: e.g. the web (html/http), RSS, and email (smtp).

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“We are still very much in the first inning of the game,” said John P. Loughlin, executive vice president of Hearst Magazines. “The second inning is presumably about to begin sometime this spring as manufacturers begin to aggressively populate the market with a lot more devices.”

via Jeremy W. Peters, Magazines Pursue Tablets, but iPad Limits Subscriptions – NYTimes.com.

Twitter and other stream-based flows of information provide an important role in the ecosystem. Perhaps the most important psychological innovation of Twitter is that it assumes you won’t see every message that comes along. There’s no count of unread items, and very little social cost to telling a friend that you missed their tweet. That convenience and social accommodation is incredibly valuable and an important contribution to the web.

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I break tablet reading distances into three main categories—Bed, Knee, and Breakfast—and define the categories by generic use case:

• Bed (Close to face): Reading a novel on your stomach, lying in bed with the iPad propped up on a pillow.
• Knee (Medium distance from face): Sitting on the couch or perhaps the Eurostar on your way to Paris, the iPad on your knee, catching up on Instapaper.

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