Williams, who is now focusing entirely on product strategy, spent an hour answering some burning questions from users. It's definitely nice to see one of the major faces of the company spending some time with us regular folk.

In our continuing effort to curate the hell out of the real-time web, we present today's conversation, powered by Storify.

Be sure to check out our other Storify-powered posts.

Recently, I ended a long relationship with Digg.com. And I'm relieved.

For a time, Digg was glorious. For sharing great content, it was the only game in town, and it felt like the future. And whenever outside forces threatened its existence, fears were quickly squashed with reassurances and shows of support from Mr. Kevin Rose. Most of you will remember the infamous Digg This: 09-f9-11-02-9d-74-e3-5b-d8-41-56-c5-63-56-88-c0. Those days, Digg was shaping the future of the Web.

Rose once said, "We'd rather see Digg go down fighting than bow down to a bigger company." But a "bigger company" turned out to be the least of its problems.

More recently, I seem to have devoted myself to engaging in a platform for which good will and good content is irrelevant - because people can't stop themselves from hopelessly corrupting its ecosystem, and its architects can't stop themselves from living in a past that while glorious, no longer exists. A platform that never evolves or improves, causes hostile relations among its users and makes the Internet unhappy.

But for many, there was the promise of reputation, a lot of reputation. Allegedly for some, there was also money in it. That is if certain parties violated the terms of service and decided to take money for pushing sub-par content to the front page. In fact, it got to the point where the entire platform was consumed by this unethical tomfoolery. Everyone knew it was unhealthy, but most ignored it. It was enough to drive a man right to the well-stocked office liquor cabinet.

And then, as the Web evolved and savvy users moved their sharing habits elsewhere, I realized here was my chance to be someone who could sleep at night - because I know what I'm sharing doesn't kill my moral center, or monopolize my online reputation.

There is no such thing as manufactured excellence, and Don Draper doesn't pay to play. So as of today, I will no longer "digg."

I know it's going to be hard. If you're interested in valuable, untainted content sharing, here's a list of services that do it relatively well: Facebook, Twitter, StumbleUpon, Reddit, Hacker News, Email.

As for me, I'll continue to focus on other endevaors, such as building my impressive scotch collection, hanging out in the West Village, and escaping impossible moral dilemas completely unscathed.

I welcome all of you to join me elsewhere online, because I'm certain that all of our best tweets and "likes" are still ahead of us.

Sincerely,

Donald F. Draper
Creative Director, Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce, Former Digg Enthusiast

Inspired by:

Why did this happen? Facebook's new groups are opt-in by default, meaning any one of your friends can add you to any group without you saying it's OK. While you can immediately unsubscribe to a group you're added to, or modify the email notifications settings for it, the fact remains that getting automatically put in a group can be annoying, especially when the topic is man-boy love. Facebook should probably modify this by converting Groups to an invitation-based model.

Facebook only shares some of the responsibility for this. We're part of the problem. I'm looking at you, citizens of the Web.

While Facebook's vision for the new version of Groups celebrate signal over noise and contextual integrity of conversations, the sad truth is that current ecosystem is tarnished by a numbers game. Whether it's the high school classmate you be begrudgingly added late one night, or an ex-significant other you're trying to maintain a connection with, chances are you're suffering from friend fatigue. Our social ties on Facebook are largely superficial and weak. In order for that to change, humans, not algorithms, need to change.

You can argue that Facebook's privacy settings are convoluted, but it's equally true that despite all the shouting people do about privacy, the majority of users are inherently lazy when it comes to curating their experience on Facebook and other social platforms. I'll refer you again to the million dollar quote at the beginning of this post: "I have 1,500 Facebook friends and I don't know who any of them are." That's a bingo!

Do your Facebook Groups lack focus?

When you're not selective about who you make your friends on Facebook, things like NAMBLAGate happen. So you'll excuse me if I don't feel terribly sympathetic towards Mr. Calacanis, Mr. Arrington, or anyone who complains about the tons of emails they got this yesterday from unwanted groups. Those emails came from people you accepted as a "friend." And with that, comes consequences.

Opt-in issue aside, I really like the new approach Facebook is taking with Groups. Now it's time for everyone to do a little less complaining and start taking more responsibility for their social connections.

In recent weeks, I've been experimenting with some newly released curation platforms. The first, Curated.by, lets you capture tweets around a specific topic using a plug-in that's installed on your Twitter.com profile. You can then easily tag and sort tweets into "bundles," which can then be embedded in a blog post for some additional context to whatever you're reporting on.

You can see our first Curated.by experiment in this recent post about Google Instant.

This week, I discovered startup Storify while watching the TechCrunch Disrupt conference. While Curated.by and Storify share the same core theme of curating social content, Storify goes beyond tweets by letting you insert content from YouTube, Flickr, Google search and more into "stories" which can be embedded into a Web page. I'm a sucker for experiments, so today I created something using Storify's platform. It all got kicked off with a single tweet.

From there, I took to Storify and began adding responses from the community. (Note to Storify: include Twitter mentions in addition to search in your next update).

Based on the responses, I added additional contextual information that included recent ReadWriteWeb articles and content from the various sources Storify supports. Here is the end result:

For a brand new service still in private beta, Storify is impressive. The ease of inserting tweets and additional content from across the Web was a generally pleasing experience. I did have some issues, though. After I had initially saved and embedded my story in this post, the tweets and contextual content I added randomly re-arranged. Considering the length of the story, it was a pain to have to go back and work on it for an additional 30 minutes. In terms of the presentation quality of the embed, it's good, but could use a little more beautification.

Storify lets you notify the Twitter users that were part of your story.

My biggest wish is that Storify make their stories "live." By that, I mean that I want anyone to be able to leave a comment on something that has been added to a story. For example, as you can see I replied to several of the tweets in the story using Storify's text module. But since there is no way for someone to reply to those, the conversation halts. I'm not sure if Storify wants their product to be that interactive, but it's something to consider, at least as an option.

I'm happy startups are starting to tackle curation. For a community manager, it's very nice to be able to capture what your audience is talking about and build an experience around it. It remains to be seen if Storify can make it as a standalone service, but I'd love to see their tools end up in a content management system like Movable Type and Wordpress.

What are your thoughts on Storify and emerging curation tools? Let us know in the comments!

Ten Things to Do When Facebook is Down

1. Rekindle your relationship with productivity, hygiene.
2. Call one of your 5,000 Facebook "friends" on the phone, enjoy the awkward silence.
3. Bring down Twitter with incessant "Facebook is down" tweets. Cue apocalypse!
4. Did somebody say crochet party?
5. Experiment with offline poking. Keep your lawyer's number handy.
6. Take a Digg "power user" to dinner. Bring extra cash.
7. Party crashing with Michael Arrington!
8. Go to the grocey store. Your Farmville vegetables are rotting and you're looking frail.
9. Follow us on Twitter. And when it's back up, Facebook!
10. Write a post just like this and watch the pageviews pour in!

In my time at RWW so far, I've been figuring out what works best on the social media platforms we have a presence on. After many scientific calculations and liters of Diet Coke, I offer the following assessment of our current social media dossier.

We have over a million followers on this up-and-coming information network, but we haven't let those big numbers inflate our egos. While we leverage Twitter primarily as an outlet to post our content, we've also recently begun sharing content from outside ReadWriteWeb that we find especially interesting and informative, and hope you will too. In addition to content, we frequently post discussion questions to our loyal followers to get their opinions on the hotness happening in tech and social media. Follow @RWW on Twitter and be amazed. You can also follow the insights of the entire ReadWriteWeb team by subscribing to our Twitter list.

Our Facebook personality is a decidedly different flavor than Twitter. Whereas Twitter is great for sharing information through links, Facebook is great for conversation. That's why our Facebook Page features frequent discussion questions in addition to select content from ReadWriteWeb and beyond. We also welcome you to post your own questions and insights. There is always a real person keeping an eye on the action to ensure maximum humanity. In the coming weeks and months, we'll be working on some cool stuff for our Facebook presence, so why not get in on the ground floor and be part of something BIG.

It's no secret that Digg is going through some major changes right now. Despite that, it continues to be a great place to discover and give props to content you find interesting. With the new version of Digg, you can follow us and read and interact with our most popular content, as well as check out stories outside ReadWriteWeb that caught our attention. Follow us on Digg.

Social Bookmarking is still very much en vogue, and StumbleUpon is the little social bookmarking engine that could. While our presence on Stumble is currently our most underdeveloped, we plan on changing that by focusing on curating, err, I mean stumbling, on interesting content related to all things Web, tech, and social media. Follow us on StumbleUpon and discover what we discover.

We're also in the process of enhancing our commenting and content sharing tools, so it will be even easier to share our insight (and yours) with your fellow geeks.

What else?
I'd love to get your thoughts and ideas on how we can evolve community at ReadWriteWeb, so please feel free to leave a comment on this post with your thoughts. You're also welcome to email me or hit me up on Twitter.

Until next time.

While Google would probably deny any elements of black magic with the latest evolution of their search engine, what couldn't be denied were the wide variety of interesting reactions to Google's latest opus from the ReadWriteWeb community on Twitter and Facebook.

Shortly after today's Google's event wrapped, I tossed up the following grapefruit:

Reactions ranged from disappointed...

To incredibly optimistic....

To downright paranoid...

For curating responses, we test drove Curated.by, which our own Marshall Kirkpatrick covered recently. It turned out to be a pretty quick and efficient way to capture what our followers were thinking. Even cooler, we're able to embed the rest of the reactions in this here blog post. Behold:

In addition to the Twitter, we also asked our Facebook community to give us their thoughts on Google Instant. Head over to our Facebook thread to see the responses and leave your own.

Do you have any fascinating insights on Google Instant? Please take the opportunity to leave them in the comments!

Until next time, Community Manager out.