For example, online political fundraising has become increasingly more effective in past decade. By separating the development of the motivation to action from the mechanics of the action itself -- the political rallying from the card swiping -- effective politicians play to the strengths of both the online and offline mediums.
I find the app store to be highly competitive. The competition drives down price, which drives down incentive for developers to put too much time into a single app. This provides what many consumers are looking for on the device: $0.99 apps that will entertain them 5 minutes.
I like how the pics page lets you see larger amount of data (pictures) at once than is possible just using Twitter, although you might want to check out the layout on that page in Chrome -- some of the text gets covered by ads.
Other than that, I'm not sure what the site offers me. Are the News / Tech / Gossip pages simply custom lists of people that are followed? Why do I want to use your lists instead of using my Twitter account, which I've already customized to include the people I'm most interested in following?
If your target audience is people don't twitter but might be into it, they're either going to end up moving on to actually using Twitter, or decide it's not for them. In either case, they won't keep coming back to your site.
On the one hand, there may be a legitimate argument to be made that the wireless networks just don't have the bandwidth to allow users to use whatever kinds of data-heavy applications they want. On the other hand, that could be solved without violating the Broadband Policy Statement by throttling heavy users' connections.
Seems to me the second part is only lame because he's doing it strictly to make money. If he were doing it for a more creative project it would just be self-promotion.
I'm having the same problem. I was signed in and everything was hunky-dory but then I signed out just to test your example... bad idea. Now I'm stuck out!
This happened to me the other day, and I was all confused because normally when a site is down I can Twitter about it but with Twitter down there was nowhere to go. It was only down for a moment though, so problem averted. Still, not sure HN is the right forum for up-to-the-minute chit-chat about what sites are broken...