From a usability point of view, as someone who has been beta-testing Socialthing.com for awhile (post your email address in a comment if you want an invite) there are a couple of key differences between it and Friendfeed, which I’m a big fan of (my feed is here). While Socialthing is well-designed for the most part, one of the biggest differences that becomes obvious is that Socialthing groups activity in your “friendstream” by individual — so next to each friend’s avatar you see what they have done on Twitter or Flickr or whatever, grouped together. In FriendFeed, however, you see a river of activity based around the events themselves, so that you see a stream of whatever your friends are doing that is grouped by time rather than identity.

This leads to the second major difference, which is that FriendFeed makes it far easier to interact with the events in question directly — not just to look at the photos your friend posted to Flickr, but to click the “like” button, or comment on them directly within FriendFeed. In its responses to people who draw comparisons between the two services, Socialthing does its best to make this into a benefit, saying it doesn’t focus on the conversation or commenting about events in your friendstream. But is that really a positive or a negative?

Some people don’t like the fact that FriendFeed pulls comments into its own service (although they can be integrated into blogs, as I have on mine, and comments can be posted to Twitter from within FriendFeed) while others — including me — see it as one of the most powerful things about the service. The fact that Socialthing doesn’t offer that actually makes it less useful and less compelling to me, and that matters a lot when so many social services are competing for my scarce attention. FriendFeed also has some useful features that Socialthing doesn’t, including the “imaginary friend” feature, which lets you track what friends are doing even if they don’t have FF accounts.

Obviously, an exit that is in the $25-million range (according to Mike Arrington) is nothing to sneeze at. But will it help Sphere to be part of an online venture that is still trying to remake itself, and is part of a gigantic media conglomerate — a conglomerate that may or may not have a commitment to the company longer term? I’m not so sure. I hope that the company’s advisors, who have included Toni Schneider and Matt Mullenweg of Automattic, are guiding the company in the right direction (Toni Schneider certainly seems to think it is).

As Kara Swisher says, it would be a shame if Sphere were to “fall into one of the dark holes” over at AOL, since Tony and his team seem like a great group. Before I added the Sphere plugin to my blog, I tore a strip off the company’s blog search for being irrelevant — and Tony not only took it in stride, but listened to the criticism and the service got better. I wish them nothing but the best, and I hope that AOL is it.

Obviously, Yahoo has to cozy up to just about anyone (even Disney, apparently) in order to try and get Microsoft to jack up its offer from what the Web company believes is an insulting $44-billion or so. Like my friend Paul Kedrosky, I think Yahoo is going through the corporate-takeover equivalent of Elizabeth Kubler-Ross’s classic stages of grief — anger, denial, bargaining, etc. Right now it’s stuck in bargaining.

Fiduciary duty obviously compels the Yahoo board to fight the Microbeast, but it still seems somewhat futile. I hope Jerry Yang doesn’t try to actually float the idea that a merger with AOL would be a good thing for Yahoo — the howls of laughter would drown him out. Better for Yahoo to suck on a tailpipe out in the corporate garage than succumb to that. Rafat Ali at PaidContent says it’s pretty unlikely that Time Warner would do it, and Ashkan at HipMojo doesn’t think it’s too likely either.

Strategic choices? At this point, the only strategic choice for Time-Warner when it comes to AOL is the choice between whether to use a .45 pistol or a shotgun to administer the killing blow. I realize that when you’re a big-time CEO running a gigantic corporation with many moving parts, you can’t just come out and say “We are selling this dog,” but come on — everyone has to know that this is coming, right? AOL has been shedding subscribers by the millions every quarter for as long as I can remember. The access business is dying, and the body has already begun to smell bad.

If anything, the death of the access unit is the easy part. Sell it for parts to an income fund or someone who wants to play the declining margins game, and then move on. But the content business is a bit more problematic, as Cynthia Brumfield wisely points out at IPDemocracy. Although the shift from walled garden to free and advertising-supported content has been a relative success for the company — in the sense that advertising revenue has been growing — it still hasn’t come close to making up for the revenue that AOL gave up by making the shift.

Even when AOL was still working on the browser, it was obvious that Netscape was already a museum piece. The last time I used it, everything from the user interface to the features themselves seemed either quaint or like an attempt to tart up something old to make it seem shiny and new, like putting a coat of neon paint on an old lawnmower, or watching an old man try to break-dance. But like Mike Arrington, I still have a soft spot in my heart for Netscape.

Navigator was the first real browser I ever used, although I had tried its precessor Mosaic a few times, as well as a few other early browsers from Booklink (which AOL eventually bought) and others. I remember the logo with the wheel from a ship, and the big N that sat in the upper corner of the browser window and glowed as the websites were being loaded. And I remember creating a “Netdex” Internet stock index for the Globe and Mail in 1995 when Netscape went public.

It was fun to watch Marc Andreessen and Jim Clark get the jump on Microsoft, and beat the bulky and ridiculous Internet Explorer. But then something terrible happened: IE got better and better, and Netscape started to get bigger and more bloated. By Netscape 5 it was actually a pain to download and use — IE was faster and in many ways better. And then came Mozilla, which changed the browser market again.

Mozilla became everything Netscape wasn’t: fast, easy to use, infinitely extendable, and secure in a way IE couldn’t hope to be. I switched a few years ago and have never looked back.