Technology

Apple’s Ping Sows the Seeds of Facebook’s Demise

Facebook is the cool site to hate these days, because while you just know they are going to come up with yet another appalling way to violate your privacy, you keep going back, because, well, all your friends are already there. It’s like a giant party that no one is having very much fun at, but no one wants to leave because there ain’t nothing going on anywhere else. Of course, you could have said the same thing about MySpace back in 2006, and Friendster before that. The conventional wisdom says that eventually something will come along to topple Facebook from its perch at the top of the social networking world. (More after the jump!) Read more…

Been away for a while

My host (Hi Andy!) was changing ISPs, and I knew I was going to have to change my DNS information, but I never got around to doing so, so the blog has been offline for a while. Sorry about that. We’re back after 59 days of downtime (according to Google), absolutely none of which was due to the hosting provider. I suppose if I’m going to be a blogger, I should keep my DNS entries up to date.

Will Intel Keep 32nm Tech At Home?

In this ZDNet Asia article from last week, Vivian Yeo speculates that Intel will not make investments in deploying 32nm semiconductor technology in its Asian manufacturing facilities. Intel recently announced a $7-billion dollar initiative to accelerate deployment of the new process in its US facilities. However, when asked about deploying the new technology in plants in Malaysia and China, Intel executives were non-committal. Intel recently announced a planned closure of a test and manufacturing site in Shanghai, although it intends to relocate the majority of affected workers to other Intel sites within China. These are interesting tea leaves, and there are multiple ways to read them. Is Intel moving to concentrate production of its newest tech within the US? Or is Intel hedging its bets, and anticipating that the current economic conditions will persist into and beyond 2010, and that the US-based capacity it is building out will be sufficient to meet the demand for the high-end parts that will be built on the 32nm process, and that the best sellers for the next few years will be budget tech based on 45nm processes like the Atom and other low-end gear? Or, are rising manufacturing and shipping costs beginning to make overseas production make less sense? I have no idea what it means, but it’s interesting to ponder.

Siftables – Blocks With A Brain

I subscribe to a podcast of talks from TED, an annual tech conference that attracts some of the best and brightest from across the world to come and talk about the interesting things that they’re doing. This presentation from David Merrill of the MIT Media Lab demos a new product concept called Siftables that stands poised to change the way people think about interacting with computers. Here’s the talk:

If you’re wondering when you’ll be able to buy these, watch this space.