As I sheepishly admitted mentioned a few weeks ago, we had our fourth birthday in February and so while it's a tad late, the annual retrospective is now up.

It was a year of fewer but more sophisticated features, some perhaps not so conducive to snazzy screenshots but very significant nevertheless.

For power users, metadata modules was the big one. These let you extract your information out of your feeds and into Awasu, completing Awasu's concept of end-to-end information management.

For the casual user, the coolest new feature is a toss-up between being able to keep working offline or the ability to synchronize with other feed readers.

And, of course, enhanced security is good for everyone

It was an insanely busy year, not only with work on the new release but also producing customized and branded versions for people and putting together larger deals like this one (and another one on the way ).

Can't wait to see what the coming year will bring

This is just fascinating to watch.

If you are even remotely geeky, you will already know what's been happening but for the rest of you, here's the back story. Digg is a "community-driven" site where people can link to stuff on the net and by voting them up or down, get to control what appears on the site. Recently, an encryption key was found that lets you break the copy-protection on HD-DVD's and so, of course, somebody posted it on Digg. In anticipation of the inevitable cease-and-desist order (that had already gone out to other sites), Digg decided to take the post down.

And the Digg users went bat-shit.

People started posting the key left, right and center, voting them up and everything else down, with the effect that the site consisted of nothing but stories with the key in it (screenshots)

Kevin Rose, the founder of Digg, reversed their position and announced that they would let the posts stand.

We had to make a call, and in our desire to avoid a scenario where Digg would be interrupted or shut down, we decided to comply and remove the stories with the code.

But now, after seeing hundreds of stories and reading thousands of comments, you’ve made it clear. You’d rather see Digg go down fighting than bow down to a bigger company.

If you're feeling masochistic, you can read the users' comments to all this here but for me, this one is the money quote:

The behaviour of Digg users over the last 24 hours has been nothing short of disgusting. A small minority has lead a mob mentality, wreaking havoc for the majority and ruining the experience of all users.

Shame on all Digg users for putting Kevin in this position.

I don't know much about the history of Kevin nor Digg but I'm sure that he and his team (as have us here at Awasu) have poured their hearts and souls into the site, spending thousands of hours over many years building something that's actually Really Good and to watch it being put in a position where it could all be brought down by some mega-corporation lashing out trying to protect the unprotectable must be heart-wrenching. I'll bet good money that every single one of those people accusing Rose of being a spineless coward, or worse, has never built a site or a product or anything else of value. It's real easy being tough when you don't have to pay the price of the consequences

If it were me, I'd be tempted to take the site down for a day or two, to give people a taste of what it would be like if the site were to disappear. But to be honest, I don't think most people would care. They would just move on somewhere else, leaving Rose to glumly clean up the wreckage of everything he had built over the years.

Man, you give people the power to do what they want and they use it to commit suicide.

Not that surprising, really