Radiohead fans set out to video the band live from as many angles as possible and then edit it into one awesome groupsourced production. The band finds out and what do they do? Cease and desist orders from thuggish pinstriped-suited lawyers? Nope. Just the opposite.  The band provides high-quality audio to assist the fans in making their video, deepening the relationship.

Amazing.

Google is stopping active development of Google Wave. Active development has stopped and Google will support the app through the next two quarters, pulling the plug at the end of the year.  Google Wave always struck me as a shiny fantastic answer, desperately questing to figure out what the question was.  Wave was ambitious in its goals, having aspects of email, groupware, wikis, social networking.  Perhaps it was too bold.  I first suspected there was a problem when I couldn’t figure out a simple way to describe it to anyone.  With its lack of integration with my existing email and other applications, Wave’s value proposition wasn’t immediately obvious.  And even after Google opened up the application to everyone, there was no momentum for it.  It just wasn’t compelling.

It is likely the technologies will find homes in other Google applications in the future, hopefully more coherently.  Truly great applications provide an answer to a question that the user may not even know they have, but upon seeing the application, they recognize that it provides an answer, if not the answer.

Anyone who has ever looked at Google Trends has had a moment of slackjawed wonderment, befuddled at who or what is topping the great hive mind of search requests. Suzette Snider? Grover Cleveland Alexander? Chocomize? John Bolz? Really? How does it happen that people appear to care, and so suddenly, too? Danny Sullivan tries to get to the answer in a piece featured today on Search Engine Land, tracing the strange and perhaps nefarious tale of how Chocomize took the world’s attention by storm…or did it?

I have been having trouble using the Twitter API for the past few days and it appears I’m not the only one. It reminds me of that old saw that Abraham Lincoln always used to say “It takes just one errant database query to bring the whole house down”. I have to admit though I am really starting to wonder about how solid Twitter is.

Interesting piece from New Scientist discussing the benefits of “weak friend” relationships on Facebook. A good read.