Something that needs to update so frequently shouldn't poll for its data. It would be a better idea to create a Comet server. That simplifies synchronization since you don't have to query the DB every time someone does a request. Instead, you query it every time someone changes a field.
It really doesn't. I'm an experienced front-end coder, and I can tell you right now that the amount of extra work I put into IE6 support is really not prohibitively high. The bugs and issues in IE6 are well-known and well-documented, so it's a simple matter of professionalism to be aware of these things, and account for them, as you code.
Depends on what your frontend looks like. The average run-off-the-mill HTML site can ofcourse be made to work in all browsers with little effort. The real pain starts when you want to do interesting stuff. Advanced AJAX and javascript magic just doesn't work in IE6 without horrible overhead - partly due to the lack of sensible debugging tools.
Well, frameworks go a long way but they don't help with the pains in the CSS area. When supporting IE6 you're generally limiting yourself to the capabilities of that browser. And for any non-trivial site you will run into hard problems regularly, unless you're leaving HTML behind entirely (ExtJS, Flash).
I think you hit the nail right in the head when you mention all these different services. There are many products out there that expand our features, however using and mashing these products together ends up with a complicated and difficult to setup service.
We picked features that are useful for non-techies and made them accessible through a single interface.
We think that there are many users that want a web page for their group but don't want to interact online. GroupieGuide is a gets out of the way solution where most of the interaction can be done over e-mail. Visitors don't need to navigate to get the information that they need.
Both ning and tangler focus on building online social interactions through the website. We are trying to cater to the users that have been ignored by social networks.
It benefits everyone when individuals speak on the language that they feel more comfortable with. If what they have to say is valuable it will be translated to other languages anyway.
I think you have a very high threshold for "valuable" content. Most of the stuff I read and consider valuable has not been translated to another language. There's just too much valuable content for someone to translate all of it, unless it comes in the form of anime. But that's a special case.
I made a light version of haml for javascript called baconl. It doesn't support embedded code, but I have found that it is not needed when used with most javascript frameworks.
If you select the 9+6 and then insert the opening parenthesis it will wrap everything automatically. This is not really intuitive, but the extra idiocy is there for a reason.
I agree, seeing all of the documentation on the same page helps you learn other functions that you might otherwise not look at. Also, the higher level the language the less the programmer has to rely on autocompletion.
TODO list, fullscreen and markdown support are amongst the ones I use the most.