God forbid that they even pay lip service to the notion that users might perhaps be given options—for then they might start to use them, and then where would we be? Sheer anarchy! Far better to reduce everything to a single dumbed-down inescapable standard, relentlessly mediocre and devoid of any color or possibility, like a tapioca straitjacket.

I haven't used Facebook Comments, but every day I wrestle with whether or not ThinkUp should have yet another configurable user setting, or if the software should just decide what's best by default. The next time that comes up, I'm going to think about that tapioca straitjacket. (Worth noting that Evans does admit Facebook Comments reduced trolling at TechCrunch, and that if he were setting up a new site he'd use it again.)

Following eight alpha releases over the past eight months, I'm so proud that the ThinkUp community and the software product itself has reached beta. The beta represents hundreds of commits by over 20 thoughtful developers scattered across the globe, and countless conversations on the mailing list, in Wave, on Skype, IM, and on GitHub. It's amazing how far ThinkUp's come since its early days as a solo weekend project.

This release includes an easy, three-step installer, multi-user and account support, full search and export of you and your friends' posts (something even Twitter doesn't offer for those of us over the 3,200 tweet limit), the beginnings of Facebook integration, and neat data visualizations courtesy of Google Maps and the Google Charts API.

Here's a quick screenshot tour what what we've been working on in ThinkUp, and how you can get involved with the project.

Compare these beta screens below to the pre-alpha look. Evolution!

ThinkUp offers a three-step, web-based installer so you can get started in minutes. You will need a public web server with PHP and MySQL to install ThinkUp, but we've done our best to ensure it will run on the most common web hosting plans available.

Connect ThinkUp to your Twitter account so it can start gathering your social data.

All of ThinkUp's functionality is available in the form of modular plugins, which make it easy for users to enable and disable different features and for developers to make ThinkUp even more useful.

ThinkUp's public dashboard displays an overview of a user's interactions.

Click on an item in the sidebar to view lists of information, like all of a user's posts.

See a list of replies to a particular post, sorted by relationship (friends come first), follower count, or published date.

Get a Google Map of replies and retweets to a particular post, and see a list of responses sorted by location--that is, how near they are to the original post.

Connect your Facebook account to ThinkUp to gather posts and replies for your user profile, or a Facebook page.

Search any list of posts and export the results to a CSV file.

See all the photos your friends have posted on Twitter.

See a list of all of your followers who have the highest follower-to-friend ratio. Likewise, see your friends who post the most and post the least (chatterboxes and deadbeats).

View a list of back-and-forth exchanges between a user and others on Twitter in one page.

We're still very early in ThinkUp's development cycle. There is still much to do. But we're looking for some brave testers and developers to join us. Here's how to get involved with the project.

If you're a someone with a web server, a blogger, Twitterer or Facebooker:

• Download ThinkUp and start using it.
• Follow @thinkupapp on Twitter.
• Check out the ThinkUp documentation wiki, and make improvements to it if you see something that needs fixing.
• Subscribe to the Expert Labs blog to find out the latest news on our projects.
• Join the mailing list and be part of the conversation about ThinkUp's future.

If you're a programmer, developer, or designer:

• Fork the source code on GitHub.
• Read our Developer's Guide.
• Browse our detailed code documentation.
• Check out our bug tracker and to-do list.
• Let us know what you think on the ThinkUp mailing list.

I haven't had this much fun launching a new project since the early days of Lifehacker. I hope you'll check out the app and let us know what you think.

ThinkUp

Google Instant is rolling out to Google.com now, but it's not available in your browser's search box--yet. (Executives confirm Google is working on that, as well as making Google Instant available on your mobile phone.) So, to get started using Instant, you must visit Google.com in Chrome, Firefox, Safari, or IE 8. Begin typing your search term into the text box as usual, and then:

Tab to auto-complete: As you type your search term, Google Instant fills in text predictions in grey following what you've entered. Press Tab to accept the next word and add it to your search automatically. For example, when you enter fast c, and Google Instant suggests fast company, press Tab to accept the second word. The Tab key in this example saves you 5 keystrokes. (Hit escape to pull back the drop-down.)

Press the Up/down arrow keys to "auto-scroll." As you type, a dropdown of suggested searches appears below the search box. Press the up and down arrow keys to move between these terms, and watch the results update instantaneously as you select each option.

If you're "feeling lucky," press the right arrow. When up or down-arrowing through the suggested search terms, if the result you want is at the top of the page, press the right arrow key. That will zip you right off to the top result, that is, it triggers the classic "I'm feeling lucky" search. (Hitting enter is still the same as hitting the search button.)

Google Instant is too flashy for you? Just turn it off in your Google preferences.

Originally published at FastCompany.com.

Priority Inbox adds an "important messages" section above your inbox. Initially, Priority Inbox decides what messages are important based on your email and chat patterns--a message from someone you often email with will get marked as important automatically. Like the spam filter, you can train it by manually marking messages as important and unimportant as well.

You can also add up to 3 other sections to your inbox. By default it's Priority Inbox, Starred items, and then "everything else." But you can define what's in each section using rules based on read/unread status, stars, and labels. For example, I keep all my unread stuff in the second section. Trusted Trio users could add a section of just items labeled "Followup." I don't love the idea of using my inbox as a to-do list, so I'm still experimenting with what works best for me.

Here's what the Priority Inbox settings look like in my Google Apps account.

As someone who empties my inbox regularly, I was dubious about my need for Priority Inbox. My email pattern is this: I respond and archive/delete messages as I can each day, and then once or twice a week, before the list of conversations exceeds 50 items and goes to the next page in Gmail, do a clean sweep. With a well-trained Priority Inbox, aspirational inbox zero folks have the option to redefine an empty inbox as an empty priority inbox, and just let the rest flow down into the regular inbox. After only a day, already I can feel my eye focusing on the Priority Inbox over anything else on the page, and I'm responding to messages there much more quickly than if they'd fallen down the list with the rest of the bacon and mailing list messages.

The only worry I have about Priority Inbox is the additional complexity it adds to Gmail. As I said this past week on TWiG, Gmail is just getting stuffed with new and more advanced features: phone calling, Buzz, Tasks, and now this, not to mention the (awesome, but huge) buffet of optional features in Labs.

I believe most vanilla Gmail accounts are in the process of getting Priority Inbox now. If you're a Google Apps user, opt your domain into pre-release features to get it sooner rather than later. (Simply opting in won't make Priority Inbox just show up today; just sooner than it would have if you weren't opted in.)

Email overload? Try Priority Inbox [The Official Gmail Blog]

Last month, a senior user experience researcher at Google, Paul Adams, gave a presentation entitled "The Real Life Social Network." The 224 slides, embedded below, describe some of the problems and common user behavior on existing social web sites, and suggest how to better design that experience. While the presentation is targeted towards businesses who want to use social media to get their message out, it also serves as a roadmap for what Google will attempt to do with Google Me.

According to Adams, the biggest problem for users on social networks like Facebook is that all your "friends" are in one big bucket. Unlike real life, there's no way to differentiate how you act and interact with different groups of people in your life. When you go to Mom's house on Thanksgiving you behave differently than when you're at Hooters with your college friends, but online all those people appear on a single friends list.

Adams also differentiates between strong ties (the 2-4 people you call on the phone at least once a week), weak ties (friends of friends, the co-worker who's two cubicles down) and temporary ties (the person you're buying a cup of coffee from). Collapsing all these different groups and relationships into a single context--like Facebook--and combining them with the permanence of the internet can lead to a lot of awkward situations. Like Debbie, the girls swim coach who realized, to her horror, that her 10-year-old swimmers could see her commenting on wild photos from the gay bar where her adult friends work.

The entire slideshow is embedded above. Adams also compiled reference links in a blog post here: The data behind The Real Life Social Network.

As the author of the first user guide on Wave, I spent this morning doing interviews with tech journalists about what this all means. Here are some questions I got asked, and answers I offered.

What do you think about Google killing Wave?

I'm really disappointed. Wave is a tool I love and use daily, and this announcement makes Adam's and my user guide essentially a history book, an homage to a product that I believe was simply ahead of its time.

What did you love so much about Wave?

I loved Wave's ambition. From a purely technical perspective, Wave pushed the edge of what was possible in a browser; it promised a new federated communication system; it's open source and uses an open protocol; it's a platform that developers could customize and extend with gadgets and robots. From a user perspective, it had the guts to try to introduce a whole new paradigm of communication, one that combined document collaboration and messaging into a single interface. It demonstrated real-time collaboration in a browser the way no other webapp had yet. It made group discussions/brainstorming/decisions much, much easier.

I respect any product that aims as high as Wave did, even if it misses the mark.

Why did Google kill Wave?

Wave simply didn't attract the user base it should have. The tool didn't explain itself well enough. The barriers to entry were just too high. The use cases weren't clear. People didn't get it. One million active users wasn't enough in the Google universe.

But why not just keep Wave around like Google's other lesser-popular products, like Knol, Notebook, Buzz?

From what I understand, Wave was a big resource-suck. It was an unfinished product that had a lot of engineers hard at work on it. Many of its features, like live-typing and chatting in-document, are now available in Google Docs, so in some ways, it was redundant. Products like Knol and Notebook are still around because either they were 20% projects or just require very little maintenance. Wave need a lot of humanpower to keep growing, and even at a year old, it was still a baby.

I believe Google is building a major social product right now, rumored to be called "Google Me", which will challenge Facebook. I believe Google Me will integrate features across several different products, including Profiles, Gmail, Buzz, Reader, Sidewiki, and Blogger. I believe Google has an interest in reallocating engineering resources towards this new social product to get it out the door as soon as possible. Facebook has been beating Google's pants off in social for too long. There were some great minds working on Wave, and my bet is Google thinks there are better uses for them elsewhere within the company.

Do you really think Google Me is going to happen? When will it launch?

I have no official confirmation about Google Me. But: Yes. And: Any day now.

Do you regret writing a book on Wave?

Absolutely not. Like Wave, the book itself was an experiment in collaboration. After publishing two editions of a best-selling tech book through a traditional publishing house, I wanted to see if there's a different way. I had an itch to write a book collaboratively, in public, on a wiki, and self-publish the results, and see what happened. That's exactly what Adam and I did with The Complete Guide to Google Wave, and as far as I'm concerned, we proved that it's a viable book publishing model. A model that lives on: Kevin Purdy has begun work on his Complete Guide to Android.

In every failure there's a bit of success. I bet Google learned some hard lessons about product launches and marketing from Wave. The product leaves behind a whole lot of open source webapp code written by some of the best engineers in the business that anyone can repurpose and port into a new app.

What are your favorite Wave features you hope to see show up in other products?

Now that I'm used to having easy inline replies, and multi-branched conversations, I really hope to see that kind of feature become available in Gmail. I also loved the Yes/No/Maybe gadget, a godsend for quickly polling a group inside a message, and drag and drop image-sharing. As for the open source code Wave leaves behind, a startup could create any number of interesting apps--like a real-time project manager or group chat system.

What else do you want to know about what I know about Wave? Post your questions in the comments and I'll answer what I can.