Part of the Chinese belief of lack of control is the amazing amount of influence Confucian ideals still hold. How can one control one's destiny if they're beholden to their family, their elders and society. It's hard to be an innovator if individuality is discouraged. I'm not implying that Chinese men and women can't innovate, but I suspect they're disinclined to believe they can. It would be selfish to create a startup and risk failure which could jeopardize one's livelihood and therefore one's ability to continue the family. Also, failure would bring shame to the family. (There's a bit of stereotyping here, of course, and I'd love to hear from people who have spent time in Asia and could give me a more complete picture).
Personally, I can't stand working in a dark room. My partner, on the other hand, prefers it very dark in every room. I suspect he grew up in a house where the electricity bill was monitored very closely every month.
Wasn't even aware Romku existed. What a cool service. I personally think, though, that the spreadsheet is more useful, just because I can compare features without having to click on multiple choices and looking at each individual list of features. However, the spreadsheet can indeed become unwieldy. Might be more useful as separate spreadsheets for each category if it gets too large.
edit: I've noticed some slight errors, but they should be easily fixed. It was a quick copy paste job, and a quick edit in TextMate to remove extraneous rows. Sorry about that. If I had the time I'd clean it up nice. Maybe someone else would like to.
There are services that rank twitter users based on interaction. Klout comes to mind. If 3rd party services can measure quality, surely twitter could as well. Granted, it's only one metric, but it's a good place to start.
--edited to remove quotes around the word rank. Not sure why I put them there.
Well, I know for myself: email is enough of a distraction without adding twitter to it. Rapportive provides a useful service by providing me more information about my contacts. By adding the ability to reply to twitter, though, it becomes more than service providing information; It ends up becoming another possible distraction. No, I don't have ADHD. I just have little self control when it comes to things that pull me out of writing. My brain resists work.
Also, of course, there's the fear of inevitable feature bloat. A service that works well at one thing should continue improving in that area without adding unnecessary features.