Many people have predicted the death of email as a casual communications channel, replaced by chatting as well as commenting or messaging through Facebook. Conventional wisdom also says that the days of email are numbered.

However, email still is the largest used Internet application. Here is a slightly dated use statistic - http://techcrunch.com/2009/08/14/gmail-nudges-past-aol-email-in-the-us-to-take-no-3-spot/

With the rise fo social media, we are starting to leave trails of our digital lives at many different places, and with our innate need to express ourselves we are always looking for a way to share interesting things about ourselves, and things we have come across.

I came across this nice website (through venturebeat.com) that allows a user to create customized and good looking pages with complete control on the look and feel of the site.

Apple's recent move to remove apps that they consider "suggestive" created a bit of an uproar in the blogosphere. A bit of background, Apple has a somewhat opaque process on how it approves apps that can be sold through it's app store, and unless you jail break your iPhone, only apps bought from the Apple app store will run. Here is an article on NYTimes provides lot more details - http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/23/technology/23apps.html

My initial reaction was - big deal, it doesn't really make a difference to people who make money through selling the apps, they might as well just have the people go to their website. But on second thought - I think that a user's perception is very different when he/she is "buying" an app vs. paying for viewing content on a web site.