I think this is significant not necessarily for what it is now, but for what it can evolve into and inspire in other services. I'm excited to see what comes of this!
I challenge anyone with a painful but non-life-threatening injury - say, a torn labrum, or a torn ACL - to go live in Canada or the UK and see what their treatment is like compared to here. Anyone?
Cheers for a brilliantly composed article! Looking forward to the interrobang - I'd never heard of it until the Oatmeal gave it a shout-out recently. Don't worry about the articles "liv[ing] up to the first one" - you're obviously thorough and articulate, so I wouldn't say you have too much to fret about!
That brings up a really powerful point: what users do and say they do are generally not the same. Finding out why there's a discontinuity between the two usually leads to discovering a great opportunity.
PBL can be very powerful in the right setting, but as you point out, it really boils down to student/professor rapport. In the best case, PBL is a fantastic learning tool, but in the worst case, as you say, it can be incredibly divisive.
I started using one of those productivity tracking applications that monitors your program use, as well as your browsing history. When I forget it's tracking me and it gives me a report of how I just spent an hour watching hulu and other crap like that, it's embarrassing enough just for my own eyes - based on that, there's NO way I'd want anyone else looking through my history.
Now, if there were a way for it to know what the cool "trailblaze"-y things are that I'm doing and skip over all the irrelevant (99%) stuff...
I, too, am curious how they've come to that conclusion. I would think it makes a difference what the app is asking of you. Asking for a "like" is certainly much less invasive than asking for access to your friends, photos, personal info, refrigerator, etc... In a split second, the longer/deeper that list is, I'd think the less likely someone would be to click "OK".
In a bizarre way, MS is continuing to create standards: when you're a developer, you have to have all the IE bug fixes in your back pocket and know which bugs are IE's bugs and which ones are yours. How much time do you think is spent circumventing IE's shortcomings? It's strange to think that there's a whole slew of sites that get tons of traffic based on IE's flaws.
It's bizarre to me that many blogging platforms still treat blogging as a content-production exercise, when in reality it's a blend of content-producing and content-aggregating. I wish more platforms would build on what Tumblr has done in terms of making aggregation more painless.
That first one is HUGE, and I'm glad it's being called out. Call it the Blackberry effect, but the fact is that emails have a tone just like any spoken sentence. Taking the extra 15 seconds to treat the recipient like a human instead of a machine makes a world of difference.