I know I just did one of these roundup posts yesterday, but there are a whole bunch of new conversations branching off of the topics I’ve been blogging about here. You might find some of these interesting.

• Big Think posted a series of video interviews with me as part of their ongoing effort to capture ideas from people in a wide variety of disciplines. Rex and Choire both gravitated towards me talking about LOLcats (naturally), but I was pretty happy with the segment about the fact that those of us who create social media technologies have a set of responsibilities that come along with our privileges:

• Marshall Kirkpatrick at ReadWriteWeb asks, Is a Perfect Storm Forming for Distributed Social Networking? Answer: Yes! There’s a nice nod to Pushbutton technologies there, but the whole piece is worth reading as it lays out some key events that are opening the door for some new technologies to succeed.

• Similarly, Wired’s Eliot Van Buskirk asserts “Open Source ‘Twitter’ Could Fend Off the Next Twitpocalypse“. This piece echoes Marshall’s premise, pointing out that recent weaknesses demonstrated by platforms like Twitter might lead to solutions that take advantage of the web’s inherently decentralized nature:

Other open, Twitter-like concepts are in the works: OpenMicroBlogger, Google’s pubsubhubbub, Dave Winer’s RSSCloud and Anil Dash’s “Pushbutton Web.” If this trend towards open microblogging trend continues, in whatever form — and despite Twitter having seemingly every reason not to cooperate — it will no longer be possible to shut down micro-blogging with one or two concentrated attacks.

• I’ve been ecstatic to see my friend Baratunde Thurston get a ton of recognition for his amazing work lately, but perhaps the most amazing milestone is seeing the debut of his new show Future Of…. With Baratunde as host, Popular Science backing the effort, and the Science Channel broadcasting it, I am extremely optimistic about this smart, funny show’s chances. (Though I do wish it were possible to watch it on the web.) The incomparable Lynne d Johnson wrote up the premiere for Fast Company and I was just one of the people raving about the series and Baratunde’s work in it.
• Finally Clint Boulton in eWeek takes another look at Google Wave and my questions about some of its complexity:

[Gartner analyst Ray] Valdes, who wrote his first Wave robot in 30 minutes using 30 lines of Python code at Google’s Hackathon last weekend, also believes Wave suffers from a complexity problem, just not in the same vein as Dash. Dash argued that the many moving parts of Wave, including XMPP and OpenSocial, make it a bear to use, unlike the easier RSS and AJAX Web technologies. Valdes said:

“I do think that Wave has a complexity problem, but it is not so much internal technical complexity as user interface complexity. In its current form, Wave fails the ‘grandma test’—that is, can my grandma use it? I am speaking, of course, of online grandmas that are already using e-mail and IM and Facebook—which these days, there are very many that are. I think Google needs to simplify the Wave user experience if they want to achieve mass adoption.”

While I bristle a bit at Ray’s use of the tired “grandma” trope, I can’t say I disagree with his premise. I didn’t want to be too critical of Wave’s user experience as I understand that it’s still early in the process of the platform’s development, but as it stands today, it is a wee bit confusing most of the time.