Twitter is 5 years old !

Twitter now has 200 million users, including tech luminaries, celebrities and the president of the United States. It started off slowly.  What began as an experiment in “microblogging” — no more than 140 characters — has become a cultural landmark.

What about you ?

Are you on Twitter ?

Are you a Farmville fan ?

Do you know farmville ? Farmville is an online game in which people must tend their virtual farms carefully.

AT high schools and colleges across the country, students are hard at work, tilling their land and harvesting their vegetables.

FarmVille has quickly become the most popular application in the history of Facebook. More than 62 million people have signed up to play the game since it made its debut in June, with 22 million logging on at least once a day, according to Zynga, the company that brought FarmVille into the world.

Devotion to FarmVille has moved beyond the social network. Players gather online to share homemade spreadsheets showing which crops will provide the greatest return on investment.

The game starts off simply: You are given land and seeds that can be planted, harvested and sold for online coins. As you accrue currency, you can buy things, from basics like rice and seeds to the truly superfluous, like elephants and hot-air balloons.

Crops must be harvested in a timely fashion, cows must be milked, and social obligations — like exchanging gifts and fertilizing your neighbor’s pumpkins — must be met.

With FarmVille there is a real sense that you’re actually doing something that has a cause and effect.

FarmVille isn’t the only popular farm-theme game on Facebook. MyFarm and FarmTown, which are made by different companies, also have huge followings. Some academics have gone so far as to suggest that their collective popularity points to a widespread yearning for the pastoral life.

“The whole concept of ‘I’m sick of this modern, urban lifestyle, I wish I could just grow plants and vegetables and watch them grow,’ there is something very therapeutic about that,” said Philip Tan, director of a joint venture between the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the government of Singapore to develop digital games.

Of course, real-life farming is quite a bit messier and more dangerous than FarmVille (perhaps just one reason that FarmVille players outnumber actual farmers in the United States by more than 60 to 1). Yet some of the game’s biggest fans are farmers.

Zynga, which is based in San Francisco, specializes in games that are easy to learn but hard to walk away from. It also makes Mafia Wars (25 million players) and Café World (24 million), the second and third most popular games on Facebook, respectively.

Mark Pincus, the founder and chief executive, said that Zynga earns money from advertising, sponsorships and players who buy in-game cash. Zynga has been profitable since 2007, he said.

“It’s really the same formula that makes Facebook successful,” Mr. Pincus said, “the ability to connect with your friends, to express yourself, and to invest in the game.”

FarmVille takes advantage of Facebook by allowing — nay, nagging — players to become “neighbors” with their friends, even those who have not joined the game. Players can earn points by helping with their neighbors’ work. They can also irritate friends who don’t want to play FarmVille with endless notifications and invitations to join, which has led to a vocal backlash.

There is way too much information on Twitter — lately, it defies navigation. In January, there were 2.4 million tweets a day, according to Alessio S. ignorini, a researcher.

Why should we care about information overload at Twitter? Isn’t Twitter about the individual experiences — a Tweeter and her followers — not the totality of millions of Tweeters around the world?

Twitter says it could unveil in the next few weeks — “geolocation” — holds such potential to make the Twitter rapids navigable.

The idea is to take advantage of global positioning systems on cellphones to allow Twitter users to include a precise location with each tweet. Users would be able, right off the bat, to limit their searches to tweets from a particular location.

“Proximity can be this proxy for relevance,” said Ryan Sarver, the director of the Twitter platform, who led a “fairly small team” of programmers who after a few months are close to completing the geolocation project. “We are about delivering the right information to the right people.”

Improvements like geolocation have the potential to make the Internet suddenly relevant to society as it is lived, not just relevant to what happens online. Mr. Sarver imagines features like “local trending topics,” a list of subjects popular in a particular area; or searches for happy hour in a neighborhood of Dallas that will intelligently link tweets about happy hours to the place they were sent from.

Because GPS will provide the ability to become very “granular” with locations, you could mimic through Twitter the banter at the local diner or a barbershop, by limiting a search of tweets to a two-block radius.

There is also the fear of loss of privacy and loss of security as once-local chats become globally public. That is why Mr. Sarver said Twitter would require two “opt in” decisions — at the profile level and again through the application.

For the technological optimists, the cures for information overload, in essence, are better filters and greater context. The more you know about a message — who sent it and

 why — the better you understand it.

Creating navigation tools for digital information is the next big challenge, said Erik Hersman, a co-founder of Ushahidi who has been in contact with Mr. Sarver’s team at Twitter.

In a direct challenge to Microsoft, Google announced late Tuesday that it is developing an operating system for PCs that is tied to its Chrome Web browser.

The software, called the Google Chrome Operating System, is initially intended for use in the tiny, low-cost portable computers known as netbooks, which have been selling quickly even as demand for other PCs has plummeted. Google said it believed the software would also be able to power full-size PCs. The move is likely to sharpen the already intense competition between Google and Microsoft, whose Windows operating system controls the basic functions of the vast majority of personal computers.

“Speed, simplicity and security are the key aspects of Google Chrome OS,” said Sundar Pichai, vice president of product management, and Linus Upson, engineering director, in a post on a company blog. “We’re designing the OS to be fast and lightweight, to start up and get you onto the Web in a few seconds.”

The company likely saw netbooks as a unique opportunity to challenge Microsoft, said Larry Augustin, a prominent Silicon Valley investor who serves on the board of a number of open-source software companies.

But while Google has deep pockets and a vast reach, it is in for a difficult battle when it comes to challenging Microsoft in the operating system market. Many companies have tried this over the years, with little success.

Google’s plans for the new operating system fit its Internet-centric vision of computing. Google believes that software delivered over the Web will play an increasingly central role, replacing software programs that run on the desktop. In that world, applications run directly inside an Internet browser, rather than atop an operating system, the standard software that controls most of the operations of a PC.

That vision challenges not only Microsoft’s lucrative Windows business but also its applications business, which is built largely on selling software than runs on PCs. Google said Chrome OS will have a minimalist user interface, leaving most space on the screen to applications.

“All Web-based applications will automatically work and new applications can be written using your favorite Web technologies,” the company said.

Google had planned to unveil the project on Wednesday but moved up the announcement after receiving inquiries from The New York Times, which reported the company’s plans on its Web site late Tuesday. Ars Technica, a technology news site, also reported the outlines of Google’s plan late Tuesday.

Google released Chrome last year, describing it as not only a Web browser but also a tool to let users interact with powerful Web programs like Gmail, Google Docs and online applications created by other companies. Since then, Google has been adding features to Chrome, like the ability to run such applications even when a user is not connected to the Internet.

Google said Tuesday night that it still had work to do to develop a full-fledged operating system. In a recent interview, Marc Andreessen, who created the first commercial Web browser and co-founded Netscape, said Chrome itself was already well along that path.

“Chrome is basically a modern operating system,” Mr. Andreessen said.

To combat these efforts, Microsoft began offering its older Windows XP operating system for use on netbooks at a low price. In addition, the company has vowed that its upcoming Windows 7 software, due out this fall, will run well on the tiny laptops, which have stood out as the brightest part of the PC market during the global economic downturn. Microsoft’s current Vista operating system is designed for more powerful machines.

Are you a Facebook addict ?

Well, you’re not the only one  

Watch this funny video !

Overstimulation and distraction can be beneficial !

This article is quite long but it is really interesting.

According to a 2008 survey by Technorati, which runs a search engine for blogs, only 7.4 million out of the 133 million blogs the company tracks had been updated in the past 120 days. That translates to 95 percent of blogs being essentially abandoned, left to lie fallow on the Web, where they become public remnants of a dream — or at least an ambition — unfulfilled.

Getting started is easy, since all it takes to maintain a blog is a little time and inspiration. So why do blogs have a higher failure rate than restaurants?

read more about it here