Ya, I think that's what I fear as well. I get into a sort of tunnel vision when I'm focused. Some of my colleagues have mentioned that they have stood at my side for a minute or so(I have a slight reputation ;) ) and I don't feel that there is anybody there. When they finally do tap, it's all the more jarring.
Same here. Between 11pm - 4am. I'm not sure why, but I just feel much less distracted at night. Maybe it's the feeling that it's calm everywhere or maybe because daytime at office, with low cubicles, is full of noise and movement. Even with my noise-canceling headphones, I can never escape the feeling of movement and noise around me.
Sometimes, I sneak into an empty conference room when I've to really focus during the day.
I don't really find it that surprising. I think average privacy concern will be just about same for all age groups. It's just that older users don't feel that online privacy is as important as the real world equivalent. For most that I know, it's not even a consideration.
For younger users, on the other hand, the line between real and online is much more muddled hence the same concerns apply to online data as well.
Both tiddlywiki and repos are great ideas. This got me thinking of other things which get updated frequently and will be useful to access from multiple locations. Hmm, probably chat logs and vim/other configs.
It depends on what he means by cloning. Speaking from an Indian perspective, there is a horde of vanilla Indian social networking sites which are just floundering. On the other hand, there is bazee.com, an ebay equivalent which was bought by ebay and is now known as ebay.in. There are other startups similar to US ones in travel, mobile payments and so on, which are doing pretty well.
I guess it's not just about localization in terms of language but also about making related offline services available, which is sometimes not feasible for the original site(s) to do all over the world, at least fast enough.