"ThinkUp captures your posts, replies, retweets, friends, followers, and links on social networks like Twitter and Facebook." Like TweetNest, but more social? Also: built on PHP/MySQL, like TweetNest, unlike Diaspora.

"With ThinkTank, you can ask your friends anything and easily synthesize the responses you get back from a variety of channels" "ThinkTank will capture, archive, and organize the ephemera of status updates and create independent permalinks to those conversations." PHP, self-hosted, and interesting.

"The problem here is the problem with all mainstream, middle-of-the-road subjects: They’re not going to be surprising." "So what would be more intriguing? I think you’d get cooler trends by sampling the Twitter flow of a smaller, more cohesive group of people." Goes into a discussion of FlockingMe.

"Search your friends tweets. See popular topics among your friends."

"Thursday's noticings are in, and now you can filter the dashboard by just your contacts/friends and family. Lovely."

A somewhat interesting leader in the Economist contrasting old-style cliques (Eton, masons) with business-oriented social networks. I'm not quite sure everything they say holds together but it's an interesting area to think about.

Looks a lot like Tom's Shelf, but in Firefox. Which, thinking about it, might have been an easier place to start.

'A little Facebook window pops up to confirm that you want to connect via your Facebook account. One more click – and you’re done.' '“You have seen the competition; it is Facebook Connect. That is the new bar that we must meet.”' Hmm. (Shame I had to trim the clever headline.)

Phil distinguishes between what he (sensibly) calls data-centric and people-centric aggregation, and goes on to note that duplication is a problem. As I note in the comments, there's beginning to be a consensus here.

A plea to change the model for pulling in social graph data: "Rather than just importing the data once and forgetting it, the subscription pattern embraces the fact that your source of data knows more about that data than you do"

I agree that Shelf would benefit from both the less-intrusive visual mode and a check-on-request rather than poll-everything mode, but I'd keep them seperate options.

Tom adds Google's social graph info to Shelf, and also stops to think about whether or not that's actually a good idea. Hopefully he'll make it past the refactoring hump.

"Identity and sharing can make everyone warm and fuzzy, but also came face to face with sobering consequences that kept me up at night with a bottle of tequila."

Part of Google's Social Graph APIs: "The core library is portable, implemented in JavaScript, and then there are tiny bridge layers which bind the language-specific libraries to both a JavaScript interpreter"

Brad Fitzpatrick's commentary on the Social Graph API launch. Mainly because of the comments, really.