Sucks to see these guys shutting down, I was really into Amplify as a curation tool up till about a year ago. Their sister site clipmarks.com is shutting down as well. Forbes acquired Clipmarks a couple years ago and created a spin off of the site as Amplify.com. Amplify introduced me to the likes of Joe Hackman, Flavio, Louis Gray, Stefan Svartling, Jay Gilmore, Danny Brown, Paisano, Mark Krynsky, Dave Yank and many others who I still follow on other social sites. As Amplify saw competition from micro-blogs like Posterous and Tumblr, and then later Google Plus and now Pinterest, the community slowly died off. Best of luck to Eric Goldstein, Dave Grossman and the rest of the Amplify team on their next venture.

Dear Mitchell McKenna, After much consideration, we’ve decided that it is time to shutdown Amplify. On behalf of the team, I want to thank you for being part of our journey. It is important to us that we shut down the service in the most responsible and considerate manner possible. Towards that end there are two things that you should consider: First, we’ve arranged with Clipboard (a new service under entirely different ownership and management) to give you an account on their service, which is currently accessible by invitation-only. You can accept this invitation and register your account now. Second, from the registration page, Clipboard will allow you to easily request that your old clips be preserved in Clipboard. If you don’t want them converted, then do nothing. We can’t guarantee that we’ll be able to convert all of your older clips, but if the demand is sufficient, we will do our best. We hope that you’ll accept the invitation to join Clipboard. Like Amplify, they believe that the Web is better when people can easily save, share and discuss the parts that they care about. For more information, please see the Clipboard blog post. All the best, Eric Goldstein Founder, Amplify

I recently posted on FriendFeed when news started to spread that Motorola would be releasing a version of the Droid in Canada with TELUS. We’re not sure for the reason, but it appears they will be calling it the “Motorola Milestone” instead of Droid. One of the interesting points was that the Milestone “will come with multitouch capabilities right out of the box” and a link to a leaked video of it in action. Jeremy brought up the differences between Motorola Droid and the HTC Droid Eris. With most reviews leaning toward the HTC Droid Eris as a better phone we can only hope HTC decided to bring it to Canada. You can see the Friendfeed conversation below:

A couple of weeks ago I got an invite to Google Wave (much appreciated Chris). To test out it’s capabilities, I wanted to test out two things; how well it would work with 200+ members in a single wave, and if it could work as a crowd sourced news aggregator (kind of a Friendfeed replacement). The result was that wave can get pretty messy when you have so many people in a single wave, but served the purpose of crowd sourcing fairly well. One of the cool features of Google Wave is that you can embed public waves anywhere online. Below you can find the wave embedded:

Note: You must be logged into Google Wave in order to see the wave.

I recently posted an article on FriendFeed which stirred up a conversation around invoicing software for entrepreneurs.  Several alternatives where thrown around, but the two main ones mentioned were the popular Freshbooks and Harvest.   Although they are very similar the general consensus was leaning toward Harvest as the winner. See the conversation below:

Note: Got a favorite that wasn’t mentioned? Add it in the comments or in the original FriendFeed conversation!