"After you've marveled at the platform offerings of Microsoft and Amazon, and Facebook I guess (I didn't look because I didn't want to get too depressed), head over to developers.google.com and browse a little. Pretty big difference, eh? It's like what your fifth-grade nephew might mock up if he were doing an assignment to demonstrate what a big powerful platform company might be building if all they had, resource-wise, was one fifth grader."

"If you haven’t heard about it yet, the new computational search engine Wolfram Alpha launched this week to much fanfare and attention. The service can calculate integrals, tell you the flying time between San Francisco and London, or even the (lack of) nutritional content of your M&M’s. But Stephen Wolfram and his team didn’t stop there, and they certainly didn’t lack a sense of humor when they built their Mathematica-based engine. Slowly but surely, people have been finding some interesting quirks within Wolfram Alpha, triggered by specific questions or events. These interesting easter eggs will make you smile or raise an eyebrow in bewilderment."

"Almost 100,000 users from locations around the world have used our tool, Glasnost, to test whether their BitTorrent traffic is being manipulated. On this page, we present preliminary results from these tests. The tests were conducted between March 18th, 2008 and January 27th, 2009.We will update this page with more detailed results as we get more data from the tests. We also hope to uncover more cases of blocking as we refine our measurement tool and our analysis. So make sure to check back later."

YouTube HD has been in beta for a couple of weeks, now it's gone live, plus Facebook has also just implemented HD video. No more bothering with Vimeo for high-res video? Some links to announcements & commentary.

"We've searched the internet to bring you the best news articles for today. We use a advanced algorthm to work out what you, the internet public is interested in. Browse the website, clicking on a story will help it become even more popular."

"This article introduces this new concept and explains how to build a distributed event-based infrastructure for social networking. The example application that illustrate this article is a distributed Twitter-like microblogging platform."

"TiVo is using XMPP now instead. ... Yep, TiVo is basically using instant messaging for real-time communication. Now when the TiVo server has a new recording to schedule, it will IM the TiVo to tell it. ... It is really a clever idea."