From what I can remember of the Steve Jobs biography (and assuming it's accurate) yes, many people at Xerox understood that they had developed something revolutionary.
Without getting into politics (too much)... there are a lot of reasons for different responses between this hurricane and Katrina. Parts of New Orleans being below sea level probably matters a lot. Plus, FEMA was pretty clearly mismanaged then and doesn't seem to be now. I think those two factors probably account for more of the variation than the wealth of the inhabitants does, and I'm sure that I'm unaware of other important differences.
"However, all your "friends" are on it. Nobody wants to go back through that process on an upstart network. Nobody has the energy or motivation."
Another possibility is that the next innovation for social networks will be effortless friend adding & management. I've never had a problem adding friends, but I find manually dealing with lists/groups/circles/whatever to be enormously painful so they're never current. The idea of separate accounts for separate "slices" of friends is appealing partly because it's both transparent and stable (ie Facebook can't change what's in my Twitter account), but it can't be the best possible approach, right?
For what it's worth, the basic reasons I use some form of bookmarks are:
1. I want to go back to a website for new content; or
2. I want to store content to read/view later; or
3. I want to share something with someone else who is not sitting next to me.
So for 1, I really want a link, for 2 I really want a local copy (in case the page moves or is removed), and for 3 I'd like to send someone (or a group of people) a copy (for the same reason as 2, but usually the time interval is shorter so it's less likely that the page will vanish, so a link is more acceptable). Sync across machines is also great for 1 and 2, not so much for 3.
I really haven't found a browser-based tool that I like for any of these. I mostly use email for 2 and 3 because I can copy and paste text or attach a file to store a copy of the content. For 1 I usually type in the URL because it works with any browser, but I do keep some bookmarks for sites I rarely visit.
A dedicated tool could do a lot better than my email client, though. Even though I want the original content, I'd usually like to know if it's been updated or changed since I last looked at it (imagine storing a copy of this comment thread, for example), which would be easy to do within firefox but is impossible as I have it set up.
Edit: I forgot to mention the other nice feature of email: most clients can easily handle thousands of emails easily -- they do it by: search; folders/tagging; threading; sorting by different columns; and I'm sure I'm missing others. So those might be other organization schemes to consider; I don't think that organizing the bookmarks into piles is going to scale well.
"We used only one Sunday afternoon for ours on the second run when we got in and I don't see the point of wasting time except getting few rounds of feedback and spellcheck."
I think many of the posters who spent relatively little time on their second, third, fourth, etc. applications are underestimating how much time they spent preparing the application. Unless you could have written that application from scratch the first time, at least some of the time spent on your failed applications counts as "writing the application." I'm pretty sure the author didn't mean 1 month of 12 hour days sitting in front of a word processor (and I think has said as much).
That looks nice. You could improve things a lot by using even a simple model to account for opponent quality, home field advantage, etc.: a simple fixed-effects regression model with team-level effects would be one approach and would take only a few lines of R code.
For an example, look at: http://www.pseudotrue.com/details which is my blog, so this is a pretty shameless plug but I don't really know of a different reference.
The point of using model isn't because you believe the model is true or expect it to necessarily be accurate, but because it can give you a better measure than just looking at (say) yards per game.
Like twitter or facebook but open, decentralized, and unarchivable would be nice. Something along the lines of Off The Record (not google talk's) where users could disavow messages from their account manually or automatically after x number of days. It seems like twitter is useful for asynchronous communication with a very short shelf life, as opposed to IM (synchronous) or RSS (hopefully a longer shelf-life), which would lend itself to that sort of privacy model.
Disclaimer: I have no idea if this can be implemented.