I'm personally sitting on the fence regarding Google+. Not totally convinced yet that the required effort that goes into it is proportional to the returns. I'd like to see Google be more innovative, instead of copying/aggregating others. They have a ton of data on us & I'd like to see them give it back to us in terms of analysis and insight.

Yes, but Twitter has made the right decisions so far. I don't think they are in a hurry, since they control such a hot commodity.

Great follow-up post to the ones you've linked to. The 107 Twitter clients remind me of the 40 or so RSS Readers that existed in the early 2000's. It's true that more publishing platforms will publish directly to Twitter, bypassing RSS. That's good and bad. The bad is that it will take a herculean re-engineering effort to extract content meaning out of 140 characters limit. The question will be: can we fully re-construct the web by shifting it to Twitter as the "index" for it? I'm going to write a related post on my blog shortly http://www.eqentia.com/blog

Agreed, especially that paid content isn't what will save newspapers. The changes required are much more profound and structural. It would be good to see 1 major newspaper take the plunge into something really innovative. Instead, they appear to be fighting their last fight.

Yes, an evolution would be to surfacing them and making it more end-user friendly, as opposed to keeping it inside the black-box. I was referring to the comment about "that could be web-changing", which I thought set high expectations.

On a positive note, it would be good to see more variety in end-user apps that make use of the Common Tags. I think there was a hint of "more software to come".

It's a step in the right direction, but it's not really a big step. Tags have existed for a while and these companies have been using and normalizing them internally anyways. What it does is to streamline and standardize the total number of tags into commonly used ones which reduces somewhat the complexity of grouping related content, but it falls short from being a total solution to knowledge management. It definitely serves the consumer more than the B2B/media who now have to scratch their heads trying to reconcile their enterprise Content Management systems's taxonomies with these Common Tags.

Google Squared is also in the Wolfram segment, although it takes a dumbed-down approach to it, just as Google dumbed-down RDF into rich snippets microformats, because they are sensitive to not having high barriers of adoption. I've heard this segment being referred to as "Computational search".

That was a seminal piece on Twitter. I felt as if you wanted to write more about the innovation part. It gave me some juice to compare where we are today with Twitter vs. the Internet in 1995 http://bit.ly/info/UTZxR So many of the same questions are being asked, but different answers, of course.