Wire Connected

It’s well known that Facebook has had its eye on Twitter, even attempting an acquisition at one point. But Mark Zuckerberg, the time-strapped CEO of Facebook, has never actively used the service publicly - his private twitter account rarely sees any action. At least, that was the thinking before this weekend. Zuckerberg now has a public account.

The account, finkd, has only 14 updates, but they have been spread out over the last month. Could Zuckerberg really have been using Twitter publicly for so long without anybody noticing? And is it really him?, we asked.

Indeed it is: Facebook’s Director of Corporate Communications, Brandee Barker, claimed via a Tweet that the account was the real Zuckerberg, a fact that we later confirmed with Barker via direct message.

Who does Zuckerberg consider interesting enough to follow? Facebook’s Dave Morin, for starters, and Mozilla Firefox co-founder Blake Ross, whose company Parakey was acquired by Facebook in 2007. Given his key role in the development of the micro-messaging phenomenon, it’s not surprising that @finkd has over 2300 followers as of this post, up from double digits only days ago.

Online retailer TheHut.com has bought the web site rights for Zavvi following the high street music chain's collapse in December.

Administrator Ernst & Young sold the rights to Zavvi.co.uk to TheHut.com, which intends to sell a broader range of products than the defunct retailer, including sportswear, fashion, perfume and lingerie, as well as the entertainment products.

The acquisition created 100 new jobs based at the online retailer’s offices in Northwich, Cheshire.

“Zavvi is a major player in entertainment retail, both in the UK and Ireland. Our aim is to capitalise on this well-recognised high-street brand and transform the business into a leading-class online retailer, not only in entertainment, but also across lifestyle products,” said The Hut Group chief executive Matthew Moulding.

“The new discounted price points, supported by significant future investment in customer-driven functionality improvements, should enable us to create an exciting online retailer.”

I haven’t spotted Ezra Dyer in the New York Times auto section for a while, but he’s back, in fine form, reviewing a Japanese car — his life’s true calling.

In Acura’s case, the “power plenum” design idiom works for the MDX and RDX crossovers, but its naked, futuristic aggression doesn’t sit right with the sedans. A sedan’s grille should not look like a weapon used by ninjas from the year 2350.

[…] the TL might prove to be a hit, a tech-forward performance sedan whose sales numbers eventually validate its challenging aesthetics.

Or Acura might slap a new grille on it in a year or two and lay blame for this whole “power plenum” business where it rightly belongs: with the ninjas from the future.

I recommend chronojingoism as well in our struggle to assign responsibility for the nation’s economic downturn. If it wasn’t for our children and grandchildren, we wouldn’t be in this mess.

The Serious Fraud Office (SFO), the independent body that investigates complex fraud cases, is recruiting for a chief information officer (CIO).

The CIO will be responsible for overseeing a major infrastructure change programme within the organisation to help better tackle technology-savvy organised criminals.

The SFO investigates complex financial and international fraud cases, and relies heavily on technology.

"We are now seeking a talented individual to lead, develop and implement the overall IT strategy for our business/office requirements and for our highly respected Digital Forensics Unit, in line with the organisation's new strategic direction and overall performance objectives," says the job advert.

The successful applicant will be able to engage at board level, and be a member of the SFO's senior leadership team, engaging with other parts of the criminal justice system.

Windows Mobile users will be getting a native Facebook application – similar to those enjoyed by iPhone and Blackberry users – with version 6.5 of the operating system. But, if you want to try it out early, now you can, thanks to some developers who were able to extract the application from early test versions of the OS.

Looking at the screenshots, the app appears very similar to the Blackberry application I use, with options to view your friends’ status updates (though Windows Mobile appears to include the full News Feed), send your friends a message or wall post, and upload photos and video, presumably with integration with the camera on your phone. The download can be found here.

Since this isn’t an official release, there are still likely some bugs, but members of the Windows Mobile fan page on Facebook are reporting success with the application. As for when Windows Mobile 6.5 and the native Facebook app might be available for general release, speculation late last year had a launch date of Q1 2009, which means it could be out shortly.

Facebook had more than 15 million active mobile users as of November, a number that has likely grown considerably with the social network adding an estimated 600,000 users per day. Becoming a pre-loaded application on Windows Mobile will only further grow the company’s mobile presence. Meanwhile, the killer mobile feature we’d like to see – GPS integration to see where your Facebook friends are – remains a mystery.

The Commander’s Emergency Relief Program has funded solar-powered water filters for a small Iraqi village, where potable water is not as common as for people living in the urban world. The water purifier was delivered and set up adjacent to a water canal on a farm where some villagers gathered to view the new piece of technology.

The purifier will run only on solar energy and will be able to quench the thirst of up to 200 local people who till now were not able to get potable water for everyday use. The project costs more than $5300, all of which is sponsored by the Commander’s Emergency Relief Program. The U.S. armed forces have installed a total of six similar water purifiers in the past several months and they plan to carry these efforts further.

Vertical farm in Dubai to use sea water for plantations.

Dubai is a country rich in oil but equally poor when it comes to fresh water sources. These geographical limitations make possessing a car in Dubai cheaper than being the owner of a garden. Of course, plants cannot be brought up in sea water, then how can Dubai go green? Simple, develop technology to convert sea water into fresh water without using your prime asset – oil.

Italian architects Studiomobile are there to help Dubai do just that with their ingenious Seawater Vertical Farm to be built in Dubai. The vertical farm will make use of seawater to cool and humidify greenhouses and convert the humidity back to freshwater to irrigate the crops. The air going in the greenhouse is first cooled and humidified with seawater, providing necessary conditions for plant growth. As this air leaves the growing area it is mixed with warm dry air, making it more humid and more hot. This warm and humid air is then condensed, again using sweater, until condensed drops of fresh water appear. These drops are then collected in a tank and used to irrigate the crops.

Ever wanted to import Facebook’s phonebook (which, by the way, leaves a lot to be desired, features-wise) into your phone? Well, now you can.

Facebook’s API doesn’t let you do this, though, but you can do this with the help of a Greasemonkey script. We don’t recommend it, especially since it probably violates Facebook’s Terms of Service. If you’re planning to try it out anyway, you’ll need to install Greasemonkey first. The script is a bit of a rough hack, and the full instructions on how to use it are over here.

However, the idea itself is interesting. How important is your Facebook friend list to you? Is it important enough that you’d wish to turn it into an address book, with emails, phone numbers, and other info, that can be synced with your phone, or other services such as Gmail? There’s a feature idea for you, Facebook.

Like Old Man Stewart, I am a Twitter skeptic, enamored of the cleverness certain writers display via their feeds, but doubtful that the 140 character social networking utility merits the media attention it is garnering, the insistence of so many new media consultants that their clients need to Tweet, and financial valuations I can hardly fathom. Perhaps one day its owners are going to be drunk on Johnnie Walker Gold, their yacht cruising around the Mediterranean, gloating via tiny urls that people like me were wrong, but I think it’s more likely that they’ll look back on Facebook’s $500 million offer as a foolish proposition to have turned down.

Elizabeth Nolan Brown is right, I think, to call Twitter the Second Life of 2009. But I’d like to focus on its similarities to MySpace. Do you remember the early days of that site? It helped its users to connect to one another more effortlessly than they’d ever experienced before — so easily, in fact, that soon one’s MySpace “friends” came to include people who thought you looked cute in your profile picture, and bands whose free show you almost went to but didn’t, and attractive looking women who said they liked your profile picture but turned out to be trolls from some Online porn site, until you decided that MySpace made it too easy to connect with people, and you switched to Facebook, which at least organized itself according to people with whom you’d attended high school or college (which is to say, the semi-exclusive social networks you were already part of).

In Washington DC, many of my friends use Twitter to say that they’re going to be grabbing a drink at such and such bar after work, or that they’ll be on a panel at such and such think tank. I predict that within a year or two, either the wider Twitter frenzy will die down, or else all these people will switch to a Twitter replacement that is more exclusive, or at least provides a better way to separate “Tweets” one actually wants to get from “Tweets” one doesn’t. At that point, Twitter will look a lot like MySpace does today — it’ll be populated mostly by people who would use a more exclusive platform to raise their public profile or sell their product or whatever, if only there were another platform willing to grant them access to an audience.

I’m starting to think maybe Gadgetell should get into the netbook business.  Why not?  It seems everyone else is doing it.  Granted, all those companies have experience in manufacturing computers or components prior to getting into the netbook arena, but it can’t be that hard.  Just get some Intel Atom chips, some motherboards, a bunch of 1 GB RAM sticks, throw in a small 1.8” HDD or SSD and put it all in a 10” screen-sized shell.  Or we could just leave that to OCZ, the memory manufacturer who just announced it’s releasing a netbook with up to 250GB HDD or SSD, which is actually a bit impressive.

The real news with OCZ at CeBIT isn’t its new Ubuntu or XP LED backlit “Neutrino” netbook, it’s actually its 1TB SSD.  Before you get too excited, you should know that OCZ isn’t ready to talk anything about release or pricing for the drive yet.  But, there’s no reason to drool over the specs of the thing.  The SSD is called the Z drive, and connects via PCIe with a hardware based RAID controller and 256 local cache.  Oh yeah, it also has a read speed of 600Mbps and a write speed of 500Mbps.  So yeah, pretty fast for a 1TB SSD.

The reason why OCZ is just showing it off at the moment is because the company is trying to find a way to cool the drive.  I suppose it runs too hot to be used normally, and requires an entirely different way of cooling, or it just needs to be tweaked a bit.  Either way, a 1TB SSD?  Sign me up for that.

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