I'm interested to see that developers aren't trusting Twitter when they said if you got close to your token limit you'd be able to apply to them to raise the limit.
On reflection, given their recent behaviour as a company I can understand that.
I'm not sure how many Twitter users actually use SMS any more. I tried to use it to send in an update a few weeks ago and it took ~4 hours for the tweet to appear in my timeline. I'm in the UK so maybe they have better response times in other countries.
I've got an Amazon credit card (in the UK) and it's a Mastercard run by MBNA.
I would guess Amazon have looked at replacing as much of the payment chain as they can and done the parts that are profitable to replace. But they have a long way to go before the enormous hassle of becoming a bank is going to be attractive and possible.
Nokia do still make some great versions of non-smartphones, I've seen a nice dual-SIM one being aimed at South America via a friend working on the project. However, I think smartphones are where the profit is. Once companies have seen the huge profits Apple have made, they want a piece of that pie. And frankly, who can blame them?
My wife just got a new phone. She wanted a basic phone as she likes texting on a standard phone keypad, and wanted an OK camera on it. She couldn't get a basic phone that did that, so ended up with a low end HTC Android (of the same spec as my mid-high end HTC from last year.) It could be the phone networks just don't want to stock basic phones as they don't make enough money off the contracts for them, they want to sell all the extras. On the flip side, last time I looked at basic phones they all seemed very poorly made and with awful interfaces, which is why I went to a smartphone a few years ago.
There are simple, large print phones targeted for older folk, they mainly seem to be advertised in the little pull-out magazines that come inside TV listing mags and similar in the UK, and during advert breaks on daytime TV.
They might be taking the view that when Twitter sees that their third party apps are showing the adverts Twitter is sending out, a lot of the pressure on the relationship will come off. It's not like this policy has to be static, in a year the policy could change completely.
And on the flip side, they have to stay positive and at keep motivation up if they're going to work on some other revenue streams which aren't dependent on Twitter.
This fits in with something I came across last year. A client had been sold on promoting their site using social media by someone at a web agency they trusted. I took a look through their followers after having some suspicions about the advice of the expert about something else. As far as I could tell, three-quarters of the followers of this company were fake. They only had about 400-500 followers, so nothing like the numbers mentioned in the article, but a pretty useful amount at the time.
I wasn't sure if the client company were aware most of their followers didn't really exist. I was trying to work out how we'd broach it with them when we were dumped off our bit of the project. I couldn't work out what all the fake followers were for, I presumed at the time it was just to make it look like the social media guy was doing his job well and it was all going well, when in reality he was just buying followers in. The idea he was trying to bring in more natural followers by having a big follower count at least means he could have been acting more ethically than I thought.
Given updates in Google over the last couple of years to make social signals more and more important, it could be a lot of people buying likes, fake followers and retweets are just trying to influence the rankings of the company/page mentioned in Google's search results by showing a lot of social activity about that company.
If this is the case, the abuse will continue and probably get much worse until either Twitter cracks down on it or Google dial back on how strongly it takes signals from Twitter. Unfortunately, given how much blog spamming there still is, even after everyone started using 'nofollow' on comment links, it may not make much difference to the level of abuse. Lots of people spend time trying to manipulate Google in ways much of the SEO industry believe don't work any more.
Given this, it'll be up to Twitter to stop the abuse, and as it makes their service look busy and popular, they potentially aren't going to be interested in being too aggressive on blocking fake accounts, unless they're being very obviously abusive. Personally, I still get plenty of accounts following me which have just started, then spewed spam links to people for days, and Twitter hasn't worked on a way to automatically shut them down (although it seems to happen pretty quickly after I use the Block facility to report them.) So I can't see that they're going to get around to shutting down harder to notice fake accounts very quickly either. Not until it becomes a large enough problem that the mainstream press starts complaining about it.
I can't see those in the HTML, whether I'm logged in or not, but I have used googleoff & googleon in HTML comments before - they're used to control which parts of a page can be ignored when using a Google Search Appliance.
So, if Quora use a GSA (or rack of them) to power their site search, they can ensure parts of the page aren't added to the index of the search. This can be helpful if you want to exclude areas that are repeated a lot in the site but are not helpful if you are searching, like navigation or help panels.
(Quick edit) googleoff/googleon are completely ignored by normal Google, AFAIK it's only used for their Appliance products.
It disappoints me that a Dropbox employee might be using the same password for a work account and anything not work related. It's bad enough that they might re-use passwords internally, but I find that understandable.
However, using a work e-mail and the password you use at work on someone else's system was stupid. You can have faith in your own security measures, but not anyone else's. If you're going to re-use passwords, at least have a work one and an everything else one.
I used to pay for Fastmail.fm as a mail service. It wasn't that cheap, but the top account which gave plenty of space and the ability to have my own domain wasn't expensive.
They kept the old versions of their web interface alive for many years after the active development of the 'default' moved on to different designs. Which was very helpful for me, as I much preferred their non-Javascript laden interface and kept the one I started with for many years of use.
I only moved on when I tripped their anti-spam/account hacked filter and didn't have my business e-mail for three days because the messages the interface gave me were misleading. Apart from that, I was very happy with them and they were very sensible about what they'd do with the interface.
As an aside, I think $12 a year is unrealistic for paid webmail as you'd need a good level of scale to make it pay for such a small amount. You're already talking about a service a small number of people want (interface staying the same and willing to pay for it) I'd expect you'd find the same people would be willing to pay enough to make the service worth running.
On reflection, given their recent behaviour as a company I can understand that.