EDIT : Apparently, this has also broken the link to the search on Summize for my exchanges with Micah. Will try and fix the link.

I somewhat wish the Twitter guys would just concentrate on getting their own service right, instead of buying a perfectly well-functioning service and begin to ruin that too. If the Summize team is now to be working on Twitter, there'll be less time to focus on the search side of Twitter (i.e. Summize), which is too bad, because it was so promising.

As ressources are always sparse, I can see the business disposition in focusing on one type of market, and then, when you've mastered that market, move on to other markets. You've definitely got a good point focusing on blogs, where Lijit works very well.

But you don't really need to change that much in your product or user interface, in order to make Lijit just seem a bit more versatile to people like me (I know you also have lots of infrastructure and scalability concerns behind the scenes, probably). Just make it possible to edit/localize the “labels” in search results. Say, “my blog” could just as well be “Our products”, and “my network” could be “Other products”. It's all hyperlinks and webpages anyway, so that is all needed IMO – but it creates whole new markets and types of use, and the best thing is, you don't have to work out the categories for different users, they can do that themselves.

Just as Disqus has something great to do, if offered to companies and product pages, I think Lijit can do wonders for linking together the different ressources of companies, and there you may also have an opportunity to monetize (dislike this word – isn't there another word for it?) better. But business people as most commonly bred are conservative to all new things. Bloggers are a more receptible breed, so I do believe you've done great by targeting bloggers first.

Kaplak won't rely on search for people to find niche products they want. We'll rely almost completely on the circulation of our widgets and on social recommendations, which are rewarded with Kaplak when they lead to sales. However, as I said in the post, we do rely on other tools in tying together our different platforms. Such tools are hyperlinks, RSS feeds – and search. Contextualized search put to work could do good things for our online multiplatform strategy, which is introduced elsewhere :-)