While I agree that Sony should not be suing Geohot for the hacking of his own systems, I think this is a bad move on Anonymous' part. At this point, it has sort of turned into "Sony kept PSN up, Anonymous took it down" and that's not going to garner them much support.
Along the same vein, Kevin Rose wrote a blog post (http://kevinrose.com/blogg/2011/1/11/cityvilles-viral-growth...) about Facebook games and why they're so popular. He came to the same conclusion that Ian Lurie did: people want to do stuff and then tell everybody about it. And I have to agree with both of them.
I bought Crysis 2 the other day and started playing through the story. For those that don't know, it's your standard FPS with the addition of two superpowers, invisibility and invulnerability. In a nutshell, my classmates and I end up spending quite a bit of time talking about how awesome our last session was, and essentially sharing war stories. And the fact is, we keep going back and playing, as much to finish the game as to have more stories tomorrow and the day after.
I'm predicting the big problem that Kevin Rose will solve on mobile then will be social task-list which lets you check-in to activities and have your social graph digg them up.
If you have Verizon and are willing to pay for it (I believe it's another $30/month on top of your data plan?) you don't even have to jailbreak. However, I entirely understand if $60 every month is too much; I rooted my Android phone to use it as a hotspot without paying a fee up until I updated my firmware.
I'm not sure I can consider Instagram and applications similar to it "post-Facebook" when they still depend on Facebook. It's true that the connections between people could be figured out or cached, separating the network from the Facebook integration, but the fact remains that they had to take the social network from something they have supposedly moved on from.
I've been reading HN anonymously for a few years, and while there's been a decrease in quality, I agree with pg in that all is not lost. The main problem, I believe, is in the quality of submissions. There's a lot more fluff/gossip on the front page (for example, the TechCrunch Facebook Comments rant) that doesn't inspire any real discussion. I think that if the submission quality can be improved, the comments will follow. And on that note, well-written and interesting comments are still fairly common... I think it will be a while yet before those show signs of disappearing altogether.
