Today, Engadget, the king of gadget blogs, turned off comments site-wide. I did the same thing here a while back due to spam reasons, but Engadget has done so due to "mean, ugly, pointless, and frankly threatening" comments posted on the site. User and community involvement is a double edged sword, and I have to say, that on my own site, I miss seeing and reading the comments from my readers (I never had very many, but they were loyal).

So, what to do with comments on blogs? You'll never escape spam nor offensive comments, but there are ways to manage the issue...

• Tweetboard uses Twitter which has seen wide adoption, but has had some reliability issues (eg, the recent database migration was fubared). I like it though since it has some viral (eg, po.st link) qualities to it.
• Disqus offloads the commenting engine onto someone else's shoulders, but since it's somewhere else you can't control it's availability. Also, user have to go sign up for another account at another site.
• TypePad exists, but nobody I know ever talks about it. I never see it on the web (it's a Wordpress world these days).

I'll be watching what Engadget does since they are a part of a much larger network of blogs and there has to be a better way to do this (or at least a way that allows for comments that doesn't totally suck).

• I have many apps (read: most) that are completely useless unless there is a 3G/wifi connection.
• The app store has tons of app for adults, but precious few quality apps for 1st grade kids.
• I'll only pay a buck or two for an app for me, but will gladly pay $5 for a good app for my kid.
• The entire first page on my iPhone is made up of connected apps (except Calendar and 1Password) and my daughter's first page is all games.
• My six year old kid knows how to use an iPod Touch with ZERO instructions, but if she had to use iTunes to get apps onto it, she'd fail miserably.

As noted by John Gruber at Daring Fireball, the simplicity of a Twitter post opens up a lot of UI opportunities. As a result of that and available APIs, we are seeing more and more Twitter clients (I have four on my iPhone), but beyond that, we are seeing the start of the next logical step, convergence.

Socialite and Raindrop are the two best examples that I know. These are applications that aggregate your social footprint on the internet and attempt to wrap some meaningful UI around it all. Raindrop is still in early dev and requires you to be a bit savvy if you want to use it, but Socialite is (Mac only and) immediately available and is quick to set up, so give it a try.

Something worth looking at when using a variety of Twitter apps and these convergence apps, is how the designer has chosen to organize and present everything. If you boil things down a bit, a tweet, blog entry, Facebook update, Flickr post, rss feed and email, all have the same basic parts...

• The person who sent it (which includes a way to reply, such as an email address or @twitter account)
• The content.
• A title/subject/name.
• Some other bits of data, such as time/date, category names or tags, etc

With such a simple set of elements, there is a ton of opportunity to design a look and feel around them. The Raindrop folks have been sharing their design ideas on Flickr and you can see they have been exploring many ideas. It's not a surprise to see a 3 pane UI like you have in Outlook, Mail.app and NetNewsWire.

Socialite has completely Mac-ified that experience, and while some folks think the UI is just too intense, I think it's done elegantly and sensibly. You can see though that there is a lot you can do in the app, especially on the right side of each entry. At times there are 5 icons and one of them has a menu with 15 actions you can take. But overall, the UI is based on a use case you already understand, email.

Back to Twitter clients, compare something like Tweetdeck (which is entirely consistent from iPhone to its Air counterpart) to something like Tweetie 2. The base philosophy of these two clients are very different, but they use the same source material. As Raindrop continues to develop, it will be interesting to see if they can find a different but equally (or more!) usable format than you find in Socialite.

For a good overview on Socialite, check out Mashable's article from last week.

• It's sluggish! Almost everything you do requires some sort of loading or syncing that takes time, and texting is an inherently "NOW!" activity. While syncing and loading whatever, the app locks up, even if you are typing. You can keep typing tho and the iPhone's buffer will hold your keystrokes until the app becomes responsive.
• When you start up the app to read or respond to a text, it has to load up an advert, and sync your current convo from the server. Even if you've received a text and saw it on screen, it usually won't immediately show up in the app since the app is syncing with the server. I just saw the message as an alert, and a preview when I loaded the app, but when I click the person's name who sent the message, it doesn't show up until the app syncs.
• Somewhat often it will glitch in one of two ways, it will fail to connect to the servers (I usually blame AT&T for that) or the UI won't update correctly. The UI will show two texts overlapping and you have to back out and start back up to see everything correctly.
• New in 2.0 is a bug where you'll see the app has a number badge on it indicating unread texts AFTER you've read all texts. You can reset that by opening the app, reading the unread texts from each conversation and then going back to the conversation list before quitting the app.
• I think this might be unfixable, but the user experience from people receiving texts from you is less than optimal. The message isn't sent from your phone number, so they have to send the name you put in the app. Most phones use the phone number together with the phone book on the phone to show who sent the text. That gets broken and the result is a fairly verbose message. My wife told me to not send texts to her from the app because of this.