Do you remember going to school when you were young and worrying about how you felt about other kids’ stupid chats/behaviors and worrying that you did not fit, and that your mom told you: honey you are special, you are different that’s why. But when you said how or why, she could not tell and just gave you a huge kiss and a lot of love! Ok you don’t remember, you were the “other” kids I’m talking about!  

Well, Eric, the CEO of Amplify is thinking the same. He knows his baby is different, he just don’t know exactly how or to what extent or how to make it more special.

Here is my take:
1. First I do think that this site IS amazing. The owner seems smart and genuinely nice: customer service is number 1. But specifically by seeing what happened to Clipmarks (keeping good posts, its freshness and sens of community after a couple of years and not falling into the bashing you can see on digg), I think the sense of a SMART community is what drives the two projects.

2. Iphone development and asynchronous use of Amplify is not an option. Amplify should be like taking your reading list with annotations with you. Think ReadItLater…. would be great to have the features of Amplify+ReaditLater+ReadItLater for Iphone+CommentOnItLater.
Imagine synchronizing your readinglist of already highlighted pieces of articles made by your “sources” in the morning just before comuting, then in the crowded NYC subway, reading only those selected snipets. An Amazing features would be to be able to comment on the articles offline, then when you get out of the metro and have network again, you just synchronize again with Amplify.com. That way you really add value over a lot of other services AND you increase the interactions (read traffic). 

3. Amplify should go further in what Clipmarks do. It’s smart to have a browser extension, but it should be used to do “trans-clipping” across sites. Why wouldn’t you do that? This is another added value which would differentiate the service on Amplify and should probably not be that hard to implement. And this (at least for me) is very interesting. I usually use amplify to clip things for my “personal collection” first, just like I always wanted to cut the interesting articles of The Economist, FastCompany, the dead Business2.0 and Fortune, but I never went through. But, when I did it, I usually clipped two or more articles about the same subject. That’s something Amplify should do. On the web I usually read one or two articles about the same subject in the same time, so clipping both would be nice. And this will be more relevant specifically as blog articles usually refer to another article, at least for the sources or the figures.

PS: regarding the SMART community: that’s what will be the tough choice. The way Amplify is now (it’s purity, and usefullness, and the topics shared) make it a more “adult” thing. See most communities start like that (yes even Digg!) and specifcally Facebook. Never forget that before gaming apps and viral (read sneaky viral) way of pushing people to share (I mean stupid ways who targets the ignorent masses, you know the ones who transfer the chain about that little kid who will receive money for each friend you send it to), Facebook was SMALL. Now that it hit the mass, it will become the new TV with a lot of couch potatoes. So the real dilemna for Amplify is the direction you’ll chose after reaching all the “smarties”! ;)

PPS: I was thinking about commenting on your post, but I would have “owned” your comment wall.

PPPS: I hope that you will bring rich text editing to amplify soon enough to be able to stress part of the text we add on the amplified.