Quoted: A redesign can be worth its weight in gold if you get it right. There is a thin line between freshening up your design, and taking a step backwards with a redesign.

My thoughts exactly. Watch them prove me wrong;)

Quoted: Here is why I would not consider Yammer a serious start-up:
...
1. No barriers.
2. The incumbent can replace their advantage way too easily.
3. No natural early adopter. The normal early adopter is on Twitter.
...
You use Yammer rather than Twitter to restrict the Followers to your colleagues. So you can discuss company secrets really securely. (That, by the way, was a joke)

Quoted: This is one of the reasons we've struggled so hard to invest in "enterprise 2.0" at Union Square Ventures. We have tried pretty hard to find companies that we can invest in that bring the new web technologies to the enterprise, but often we've found what happens is that consumers (ie employees) bring the web technologies they use every day to work and they prefer that.

Some insight into how StumbleUpon works. Not too surprising.

Quoted: As you can see in the chart below, there are three key parts to the Recommendation Engine. There are pages from the topics you marked that interest you, socially endorsed pages and peer endorsed pages. Socially endorsed pages are the ones that users you have befriended on the site like, while peer endorsed pages are ones from users who have similar voting habits (giving a site the thumbs up or thumbs down) as you.

I agree. The FB and OpenSocial application platforms open up tremendous opportunities for social asynchronous gaming (think Scrabulous)

Quoted: Making the gameplay asynchronous fits better with the “continuous partial attention” world that we increasingly live in. The reason I never became a hard core gamer is that the serial monogamy requirements (one game at a time, total dedication, long periods of gameplay coordinated with others) doesn’t mesh well with my lifestyle. Scrabulous is a better match for the “play a little bit when you have some time, at various points throughout the day” life that many of us lead.

Agreed.

Quoted: High value content creators
The point is, the users that come to your site and create content are hugely helpful. So the question is, how do you find and support these high-value users? Here are a couple thoughts from a brainstorm:
...
* Build features that support high-quality single-user experiences
* Make it easy to create content on the site, and reward users that do
* Create differentiated experiences that users can weave into their daily routine
* Be as sticky as possible - this is a place where software clients are great, but websites are hard

ReFave of a nice mention.

Quoted: Michael [Arrington] appears extra frustrated because like most of us he wants Delicious to succeed. As a matter of fact, he named Delicious one of the Web Apps you can't live without in 2006, but then dumped Delicious in 2007 for BlueDot (Now Faves.com) because they were surpassed when it came to features.
...
While Yahoo has been asleep at the wheel, countless new social bookmarking services have pulled ahead of the once king of online favorites. The best of the bunch being Magnolia and Faves.

This list of valuations seems more reasonable than others I have seen.

Quoted: Putting a value on private companies is hard enough for insiders and venture capitalists who have full access to the company's financial statements. ...

I came across this article while I was browsing the physical Seattle Magainze and noticed that it features Marcelo.

Quoted: Marcelo Calbucci could be raking in big bucks at Microsoft—fine-tuning the tech behemoth’s Internet strategy between cappuccinos and occasional workout breaks at the nearest campus health club. But three years ago he left this job and its accompanying work life.