I quite enjoy using twitter as an easy way to keeping in touch with people and making contacts, but they need to develop a trust and rating system of some kind. Trying to follow a busy "channel" is impossible when it's being bombarded with crap. Because channels are effectively filtered tweets grepped via a search engine, there's no uniform way of rating down a user who insists on trolling or spamming. Have a look at #gaza - i bet about 3 out of 10 tweets are worth reading.

It's an interesting idea, but there are some notification that I will want to click on. Amarok popping up that I have a new song playing is fine, that's something I don't need to interact with, but Pidgin telling me I have a new message is something I need to respond to. Having to click into Pidgin sounds like a cumbersome option, rather than just being able to click the IM notification when it first appears.

Say, your iPod isn't working well - the battery is worn out and you're having to recharge every two hours. If you go to an Apple store, you will have to book an appointment at the 'genius bar' to sort it out. It's their tech support.