Industry analysts have been questioning for years whether Twitter is financially viable. Well, maybe it isn't–maybe this particular kind of Internet platform is not destined to be a business. Responsibility for the platform can be distributed among millions of sites and developers, while business opportunities can be built on top of the platform as services in analytics, publicity, and so forth.

Like Google, Twitter and the other leading commercial Internet sites have made tremendous contributions to the functionality of the Internet and have earned both their popularity and (where it exists) their revenue. But the end-to-end principle and the reliability of distributed processing must have their day again, whenever some use of the Internet becomes too important to leave up to any single entity.

Source: here

“People tend to fool themselves with their self-narrative of ‘national identity’, which, in a breakthrough paper in Science by sixty-five authors was shown to be a total fiction. (’National traits’ might be great for movies, they might be help a lot war, but they are Platonic notions that carry no empirical validity…) Empirically, sex, social class and profession seem to be better predictors of someone’s behaviour than nationality (a male from Sweden resembles a male from Togo more than a female from Sweden; a philosopher from Peru resembles a philosopher from Scotland more than a janitor from Peru, and so on.)

From Cnet (via Alan):

Even if you just checkmated your new friend in India or took your Russian opponent’s rook, new chess Web sites like Chess.com are encouraging niche social networking. CNET News.com’s Kara Tsuboi sat down with the site’s founder to find out what has attracted more than 100,000 members in less than a year.