Is Facebook a private blog?

What is keeping blogs from becoming an “open-source” replacement for Twitter and Facebook? It’s not much, but they are important usability issues.

To me it is sorta like Apple/Steve Jobs and the iPhone. What did he/they do that was different from what had been done before? Not much, but important stuff. They obsessed over a million little things and put it together in a precise, perfect way that made the experience great vs the other blah stuff.

The comment thread here has a few suggestions
- subscriptions to other blogs should be easier
- the default view for one’s blog should be the aggregator/river view of all the people you are following with the slot for writing a new post at the top

Other things Facebook improvements:
- no subjects (in both posts and private messages/FB emails) Most blogs still use subjects, though they don’t need to.
And a big one they don’t mention in the link above:
- Privacy. Sharing with just friends or friends of friends.
- Drag and drop media sharing. Maybe it’s this easy with some blogs but not in my current WordPress one…

Someone will think of a clever way to improve blog interfaces and do the privacy thing in an open internet-y way outside of Facebook I bet. But on the other hand, Facebook is now a huge company like Microsoft and Google, etc. and so it will adapt quickly to any competition.

What if Larry Page and Sergey Brin (Google co-founders) were SVS kids instead of Montessori kids?

“You can’t understand Google,” vice president Marissa Mayer says, “unless you know that both Larry and Sergey were Montessori kids.” She’s referring to schools based on the educational philosophy of Maria Montessori, an Italian physician born in 1870 who believed that children should be allowed the freedom to pursue their interests. “In a Montessori school, you go paint because you have something to express or you just want to do it that afternoon, not because the teacher said so,” she says. “This is baked into how Larry and Sergey approach problems. They’re always asking, why should it be like that? It’s the way their brains were programmed early on.”

From: LINK: Larry Page Wants to Return Google to Its Startup Roots

See also:
- Larry Page and Sergey Brin discuss their experience as Montessori students with Barbara Walters
- Sudbury Valley School