The four most interesting projects in the last five years are Tesla, SpaceX, Google Driving, and Google Goggles. That is one individual, Elon Musk, and one company, Google, doing all four things that are truly Silicon Valley-class disruptive.

In the long run, people will trust Twitter more than they do Facebook. And when it comes to building a long-term, trusting relationship with its users, Twitter will take it slowly and steadily, and in doing so, could win the race.

This article was an exceptional example of humor in tech-writing.

It's simple - we go through your tweets, find those with links and post them to your delicious account. This way you'll never lose the links you posted on Twitter...

It's possible that over the next few years, Google's engineers could find a way to reduce dramatically the costs of hosting such a service. (They're capable of amazing things.) But that proposition is iffy. As Wayne argues, there's a very real possibility that YouTube as we know it is doomed. The company may have to institute restrictions to keep its bandwidth in check, or it could unveil any number of pay-per-use schemes (as some other video sites have done). Then the video free-for-all that we've grown to love will come to an end.
That would be unfortunate. Time wasn't wrong: YouTube and its fellow user-contributed sites really did change the world. Too bad nobody could find a way to pay for it.

Facebook plans to turn on real-time updates as well. But when it does, it could well be looking at another major backlash from users. If we saw a backlash against real-time on FriendFeed — which not only has much fewer users, but also has a user base that is considered to be full of “power” web users — just imagine what the backlash will be like on Facebook. It will be ugly.

And that’s why filters are so important. These allow you to show only certain updates from certain people on your stream. But again, FriendFeed has done a better job on them than Facebook has. Facebook has made it fairly easy to edit who is in what filter, but it’s still not obvious as to how to do that from a friend’s actual profile page. On FriendFeed, it’s obvious.

Facebook announced that it hit 200 million users today and Chief Operating Officer Cheryl Sandberg made a blog post describing some of the data mining that the company is doing of those connections. It's going to be great for advertisers, she says, it should also be very good for the rest of us as well. I think it's creepy.

It's all about "The Stream." The conversations we have in public parts of the site, the items we interact with in our Facebook Newsfeeds, and the way that builds connections between a larger group of people. Here at ReadWriteWeb we're very excited about social networking, real time feeds, network effects and the like. But this Facebook ethos has gone far enough that it's time to question whether there's something cult-like going on.

Sociologist Robert J. Lifton wrote an outline several decades ago of what makes some groups considered "cults." There are some parallels with the way Facebook is working these days.

It was less than two weeks ago when The Pirate Bay implemented a new feature making it easier for site users to post links to torrents on their Facebook profile, so their friends can download those torrents with just a single click.

This morning Facebook decided to put an end to the sharing and blocked not only the feature, but all links to Pirate Bay’s torrents. The ‘Share on Facebook’ button on the TPB torrent download pages doesn’t work anymore, and neither does the Facebook bookmarklet. Manually adding a link to your Facebook messages isn’t allowed either, regardless of the “legality” of the content it’s linking to. Facebook has basically launched a site-wide ban of Pirate Bay torrent URLs.

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