IMDb.com, the 57th most trafficked site in the world, was born in the late 1980s on a Usenet board called rec.arts.movies where movie buffs swapped lists of actors, casts, directors and other trivia. But lists are only so useful. 

In October 1990, someone asked the board, "Does anyone out there have a Unix or C program which can 'interrogate' the actor/actress files? What I want to be able to do is to type in an actor/actress' name and get out a list of all the films which they appeared in." Col Needham, a British film buff who regularly posted to the message board, replied, "Well I can't provide you with exactly what you want, but I have a Unix script which might be of some use." A month later he posted an update to a list of to the board and in that message offered the scripts to anyone who wanted them.

I have produced a set of Unix scripts to create a movie database using the information on the lists. They make it easy to search for all appearances by an actor/actress or all the cast and director of a particular movie and are available by e-mail if you missed them.

Needham would soon take his creation to the nascent World Wide Web. But until then, if you wanted movie trivia - say, for instance, a list of thousands of dead actors and the movies they were in - you signed onto rec.arts.movies and looked for a posting like this:

9:21: John Paul Titlow: We've got 40 minutes to go, and still the last-minute leaks and rumors are churning. What has been confirmed is that we'll be getting the iPhone 5 (by that name), new iPods and an iTunes update. If history is any indication, they should be pushing out iOS 6 very soon as well.

9:24: Dan Rowinski: I am coming into this new iPhone with fairly low expectations. This time around there is less suspense as many reporters, pundits and analysts seemingly have figured out their way around the Apple supply chain to, more or less, figure out what the new iPhone is going to entail from a hardware perspective.

9:30: Dan Rowinski: There are several things I will be looking for as surprises to the day. Will Apple come out with an NFC solution, possibly tied to its Passbook application? What is in iOS 6 that we don't already know about? How will Apple increase screen resolution, battery capacity, graphic and computer processors? It is very important for Apple to have top of the line hardware in the iPhone 5 or it will be outclassed the moment it hits store shelves.

9:44: Adam Popescu: As the world waits for the new iPhone, I can't help but wonder if it's going to really wow, or maybe even disappoint. And will people flock to get the soon to be vintage 4 for free rather than pay out a small fortune for the brand spanking new 5? All that and more in less than 15 minutes...

9:53: Adam Popescu: Apple also expected to launch new iPod nano, an updated iPod Touch & new iTunes 11 at today's event. But does anyone really care about this? I want the iPhone. These others are like the ugly sisters I don't want to marry.

9:57: Taylor Hatmaker: I'm really looking forward to the screen size bump. It's been my biggest beef with the iPhone lately... 3.5 inches is  absurdly tiny in the 2012's smartphone ecosystem.

Any kind of physical redesign is exciting. While i'm hoping it's a bit of a departure from the iPhone 4/4S, I imagine Apple will maintain the industrial aesthetic that informed the last-gen design. If it ain't broke...

9:59: Jon Mitchell: If iOS 6 doesn't fix document syncing, the whole thing is still a bit of a charade.

10:01: John Paul Titlow: One debate that's still ongoing is whether the new iPhone will include an NFC chip. It doesn't look likely, but there are still those who predict it will, including iOS developer @Chronic. This would be a bit of a surprise and will make the whole PassBook thing a bit more interesting.

10:03: Brian Proffitt: Getting ready to watch the rest of the world get revved up for a phone that will undoubtedly both excite and disappoint all in one stylish swoop. Meanwhile, Android users still enjoy choice of devices.

10:03: Dan Rowinski: Retail update and Tim Cook talking about Apple signature glass staircase. I wonder if Apple has a patent on that.

10:08: Brian Proffitt: #1 in U.S. laptops is good news. Though "in the last three months" is a bit selective

10:09: Adam Popescu: Apple has 15% year over year growth versus 2% for pcs. Gee, kick em while they're down again, why don't you...

10:09: Adam Popescu: Apple: We are No. 1 #humblebrag

10:09: Brian Proffitt: 84 million iPads total. Great-googley moogley...

10:09: Adam Popescu: @brian thats a scientific expression, right?

10:09: Brian Proffitt: Yup.

10:15: Jon Mitchell: Schiller notes that basically everybody in the room is using an Apple device to report, so he's staring out at a sea of Apple logos.

17 million iPads in a quarter equals roughly 130 iPads sold *per minute*. Holy frickin' crap.

— Brett Kelly (@inkedmn) September 12, 2012

10:15: Dan Rowinski: These events are always so predictable. The CEO or chairman or whoever comes out and spouts a lot of numbers about how good they are doing and how their recent innovations are changing the market. In Apple's case, that is truer than other companies, but the script is fairly standard at this point. Then we get into several cool features like highlighted third party apps and the CEO gets off stage to somebody else, like the head of marketing. Then come the products, each introduced with its own brief history and fanfare. Then an engineer type comes up and shows off some functions with a very well rehearsed spiel . Everybody fawns and tweets profusely about how great the new device is going to be. It was Steve Jobs that started this script and it works … it is just very predictable now.

10:17: Fred Paul: "This is unlike anything we or anyone else in our industry has made before."  Really? It looks an awful like what you and everyone else in our industry is making right now.

10:17: Brian Proffitt: iPhone gets a diet. Nice feature against the slim Androids.

10:18: Taylor Hatmaker: 18% thinner than the 4S... i imagine them just driving a steamroller over it during development

10:18: Ted Greenwald: 112 grams. Is this a drug deal?

10:21: Adam Popescu: The new iPhone reflects so much light no one can see anything. This is called the wow affect. Also called glare

10:25: Ted Greenwald: Now we get to the practical speed specs. Claiming 2x improvement. Faster always equals better when it comes to buttons and screens. So what's missing, folks?

10:26: Adam Popescu: When will the iPhone mind control app be introduced and can I beta test it? Real app heads want to know and they want to know now.

10:27: Antone Gonsalves: In spouting iPhone 5 specs, chief marketer Phil Schiller makes me feel like my iPhone 4S is a dinosaur with a two-year contract.

10:28: Brian Proffitt: If they have upgraded everything, then the camera is probably going to be better, too.

10:29: Adam Popescu: @Antone the iPhone 5 is the meteor that killed the dinosaurs. Fact.

10:30: Fred Paul: My contract is up, so now I gotta decide which phone I want. And it'll probably be a iPhone 5 (small possibility of Galaxy Note 2 - I really like BIG screens)

10:30: John Paul Titlow: This is a really, really compelling upgrade for those of us who didn't spring for the 4S. I'll be ditching my iPhone 4 for sure.

10:31: Adam Popescu:Apple taking if it ain't broke don't fix it and giving us a whole new reason to fix stuff that isn't broke. Like my English.

10:31: Ted Greenwald: No battery life figures provided for 4G talk time?

10:33: Fred Paul: Camera specs look good, but how will it do in low light - that's my chief complaint with the current one, not the other stuff.

10:33: Adam Popescu: Whoever is the stylist for Apple CEOs needs to be fired.

10:33: Ted Greenwald: If you wear your Google Glasses, it improves all their haircuts and aligns their tie colors.

10:34: John Paul Titlow: The iPhone 5 camera makes kids look happier!

10:34: Adam Popescu: And people less fat!

10:34: Taylor Hatmaker: 40% faster photo capture on the new iPhone 5 camera. That's something that definitely made me prefer the One X's camera at times.

10:34: Brian Proffitt: The ocean looks bluer, kids look happier... and the world is a more beautiful place." You people are laughing. They probably are serious.

10:35: Ted Greenwald: I'm with @Dan, remarkably little discussion of battery life. That's the final frontier for mobile devices. Well, battery life and coverage.

10:35: Dan Rowinski: Looking at the iPhone 4S specs and it doesn't list mAh. Just talk time/standby etc. Somebody last week, a Nokia or Moto exec said, "Talk time is a bullshit metric."

10:35: Taylor Hatmaker: The iPhone already owns on battery life... They've been leading the charge (har) on that for years.

10:36: Ted Greenwald: Leading is not good enough. We need breakthroughs.

10:37: Taylor Hatmaker: Wonder how much further it can really be pushed.

10:36: Brian Proffitt: If this thing shrinks any more, it will approach the density of a white neutron star. That will make the next launch kind of awkward.

10:37: Ted Greenwald: They can call the next phone the Black Hole.

10:37: Brian Proffitt: Thunderbolt and Lightning, very, very frightening?

10:38: Fred Paul: Thunderbolt and Lighting ?! Ugh. Uncharacteristically cheesy.

10:40: Adam Popescu: World, we're not skeptical of the new iPhone. The truth is, each and every one of us want one really badly. Badly enough to throw verbal bars and jabs at Apple from the comfort of our Apple devices.

10:41: Fred Paul: I think Apple is underestimating the disruption caused by the new connector.

10:42: Brian Proffitt: I'm with you Fred. My daughters' alarm clocks just got hosed.

10:43: Fred Paul: Oooh - full screen mode on Safari. All the other mobile browsers are saying "Welcome to the neighborhood."

10:48: Ted Greenwald: Lack of NFC has big implications for the rollout of that tech. I guess it's going to be another year or two or three.

10:48: Antone Gonsalves: No need to run out and buy an iPhone 5 right away. Apple still working with partners on updating products for new display, audio and connector. This is going to take a while.

10:49: Jon Mitchell: Apple wouldn't skip the NFC revolution unless its analysis made it certain that the merchant side wouldn't get on board anytime soon.

10:49 Brian Proffitt: Ooo, sports scores. "Siri, when will the Cubs win the World Series?" System Crash.

10:50: Ted Greenwald: Siri news - sports scores, restaurant reservations - is underwhelming.

10:51: Adam Popescu: They need to give Siri a sexier voice already - robots aint' sexy. Unless your name is C3PO or Bender.

10:51: Ted Greenwald: A choice of voices. My requests: Yoga angel, French maid, Sassy homegirl...

10:52: Adam Popescu: @fred As chief critic of Siri's voice I approve that.

10:55: Ted Greenwald: Thin and light versus extended battery life. That was the big choice Apple made.

10:56: Fred Paul: Crowing about fit and finish is nice, but 1: The existing iPhones are pretty good in that regard. 2: These things only last a couple years. OTOH: you do touch them A LOT.

11:00: Jon Mitchell: Same prices, no surprise.

11:01: Fred Paul: I think a lot of people will like iPhone 4s for "free".

11:01: Adam Popescu: Free being new contract/slavery to the Apple empire. I'm down.

11:05: Adam Popescu:“Today I’m happy to report that the iTunes store is available in 63 countries around the world.” There are that many countries? Wow, now I'm really learning something.

11:07: Fred Paul: What I really want to see is a way to listen/manage music on my iPhone without having to use the software abomination that is iTunes. The least good part of the whole ecosystem, and a deal breaker for many businesses (tho large enterprises are given a way around it).

11:08: Antone Gonsalves: Now is the time to buy Apple stock. If iPhone 5 sales exceed expectations, price will soar.

11:13: Adam Popescu:@antone @fred now is the time to be Samsung and copy the new iPhone. I mean borrow - I mean - ah the hell with it!

11:15: Jon Mitchell: That was a long demo for a total snooze of an iTunes update.

11:18: Adam Popescu: Ah the nano. In Italian nano means dwarf. That's about the size of how much I care about it.

11:18: Fred Paul:iPods still exist? Why?

11:19: Dan Rowinski: Ooh look. New colors for the iPods. Now they can imitate the Nokia Lumia 920.

11:19: Jon Mitchell: The round bubble icons on the new iPod Nano are profoundly disappointing.

11:20: Ted Greenwald: Why do iPods still exist? Because they're cute. And you can make them into watches on Kickstarter.

11:21: Fred Paul: Now that they're on the iPod touch, 12-year-old boys around the world are about to start paying attention.

11:25: Dan Rowinski: How damn long is this keynote going to be?

11:25: Brian Proffitt: Wait, they put a pedometer in the Nano? The device that isn't able to connect to the Internet so I can track this data?

11:32: Brian Proffitt: Siri on the iPod Touch. That's a neat little add.

11:32: Fred Paul: All those 12-year-old boys now have a new best friend: Siri.

11:33: Fred Paul: "Apple is one of the biggest providers of speakers in the world. We put them in just about everything we sell." And they all sound pretty much terrible. Musicians say it's killing sound quality and the appreciation of it.

11:35: Adam Popescu: @fred Those earbuds literally kill your ears. Hate those. Now they're called Earpods - yah, prob because they were no ones best buds.

11:37: Ted Greenwald: Those earbuds look good to me. Judging from the extra ports, it looks like the claim of better bass response is credible. Sold separately, unfortunately.

11:39: Fred Paul: Ooops. The 12-year-old boys are crushed: New iPod Touch starts at $299. Sure it has 32GB, but $300 is a lot of cash for a product that only exists for folks who can't afford an iPhone.

11:40: Ted Greenwald: No monthly contract, Fred.

11:41: Fred Paul: I know, and that's the whole point. But $300 is still $300. Too high for many of the kids who are the prime customers.

11:41: Brian Proffitt: I'm not sure, Fred. My kids could save up for one if they really tried, and they also fit the demographic Apple also wants: kids who can afford iTunes content.

11:42: Ted Greenwald: iPod is a gateway to iPhone.

11:44: Fred Paul: I'm sure they'll do fine, but really would have liked them to make it easier for kids. iPod touch is how my son got into programming, and $300 will keep many out...

11:45: Brian Proffitt: IThe Nano is probably aimed at the lower income market.

11:44: Fred Paul: @brian, yes, but you can't do much with it.

11:44: Dan Rowinski: The Foo Fighters is so much more impressive than the band called "The Kin" that no one had ever heard about at the Motorola Razr event.

11:47: Fred Paul: So, the biggest, most unexpected news was... iPod Nano?

11:50: Mark Hachman: If T-Mobile could only improve its spotty coverage, I'd be tempted to buy an unlocked iPhone and bring it to that network. The throughput of the network only matters if the phone's data traffic exceeds the available throughput. Otherwise, it's a matter of latency, and I'm willing to put up with a little more latency if I can buy a cheaper, truly unlimited data plan - like the one T-Mobile offers. Consider Rootmetrics' recent report: http://www.fiercewireless.com/story/report-t-mobiles-hspa-almost-fast-atts-lte/2012-09-11

But jumping from "4G" to EDGE to no signal while on a BART train still is the most frustrating element of the T-Mobile experience.

11:51: Dan Rowinski: The LTE displacement on both AT&T and T-Mobile is crap. Verizon does a much better job displacing between LTE and its 3G CDMA network.

11:56: John Paul Titlow: Wow, I still have zero interest in using iTunes at all, ever.

11:57: Dan Rowinski: I haven't signed into iTunes on my new iMac and I have had it since April.

12:00: Brian Proffitt: No news about a new iTunes. More evidence of Apple's disconnection of it's iOS devices from OS X.

12:00: John Paul Titlow: So much for those iPod Nano watches.

12:00: Abraham Hyatt: And that's it!

Photo by DennisG.

Created by the guys behind @HAL9000_.

Zynga's share price plummeted almost 40% in after-hours trading Wednesday after the company reported a $22.8 million loss for the second quarter. The social gaming developer also revealed that it was lowering its outlook for the rest of the year, due in part to "a more challenging environment on the Facebook web platform."

Zynga is hugely dependent on Facebook; it reported earlier this year that 92% of its revenue was generated through the social media giant.

Shares in Facebook, which is announcing its earnings on Thursday, fell 8% following Zynga's report.

In the earnings report, company CEO and founder Mark Pincus touted Zynga's growing advertising business - its revenue was up 170% year-over-year - but said the company "faced new short-term challenges which led to a sequential decline in bookings." Average daily bookings are down 10% year-over-year.

Zynga raised $1 billion in its IPO last December, but has seen its stock price drop by half since then. Today it reported that it had 72 million daily users, up 23% from the second quarter of 2011.

But the numbers tell a different story if you compare today's announcement to December 2011. In the last six month, Zynga's flagship 'Ville games - CityVille, CastleVille, FarmVille - have lost millions of daily players.

Photo by auchenberg.

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Facebook CTO Bret Taylor, who once described himself as being in "violent agreement" with Mark Zuckerberg, is reportedly stepping down later this summer to work for an unnamed startup. Taylor has been a leading figure behind some of the most familiar innovations in the last decade - Google Maps, Facebook's social plugins and Open Graph. His decision to abandon Facebook for a startup is an ominous sign for a company that, until its disappointing IPO, was considered an unstoppable juggernaut.

Taylor joined Google in 2003 and was the co-creator and project leader for the team that built Google Maps. He left in 2007 and created the social sharing site FriendFeed. Facebook bought the site in 2009 and hired Taylor. He was named CTO less than a year later.

While at Facebook, he oversaw platform and mobile, which included projects like the Graph API, Open Graph and App Center. Mike Vernal and Cory Ondreijka, who worked under Taylor, will take over platform and mobile, according to tech news site All Things D.

In the months leading up to the passage of CISPA, Google, AT&T and dozens of other companies unleashed a small army of lobbyists on the White House, Congress and the Senate. The crusade was just a fraction of the $32 million that the tech industry - which is fast becoming one of the most powerful political forces in Washington D.C. - has spent on lobbying so far this year. So how much did they spend to get CISPA passed?

Federal disclosure laws require companies to report the total amount they spend on a lobbying firm and what topics and bills that firm worked on. But it doesn't require that the company reveal how much was spent on each individual piece of legislation.  It's a loophole that lets companies, regardless of industry, conceal how much work they're doing to influence legislation.

For example, in the first three months of this year, Google spent a little over $5 million on 19 lobbying firms and 70 lobbyists. They worked on things like job creation and clean energy bills, cloud computing and  education technology. And somewhere in there "cyber security" and CISPA. For that, the lobbyists met with nameless members of Congress and the Senate, and with the Executive Office of the President, home of President Obama's chief of staff, the economic and national security councils, as well as the office of science and technology. Google reports those surface-level details, but how much time and resources went into that work is unknown. 

Missing the $1.3 Billion Dollar Forest

Focusing on one bill, like CISPA,  misses the bigger power that the computer and Internet industry has developed in Washington.  In the last 14 years, its companies have become some of the biggest spenders on lobbying, paying a combined total of nearly $1.3 billion to ensure that they have their say in legislation. 

The people and political action committees associated with the industry are big givers, too. In the last presidential election they gave $41.4 million to federal candidates. But that's a small fraction of the what the companies themselves are spending on lobbying - $126 million last year alone. 

It's not just big companies like AT&T and Google. According to The Center for Responsive Politics, it's the combined strength of dozens of smaller companies that account for the industry’s increased clout. In total since 1998, the Internet and computer industry has even outspent traditional political powerhouses like the oil and gas industry. 

Fewer Players Spending More

There was an explosive increase in lobbying by the Internet industry in the early '00s. That slowed at the beginning of the recession and has been on the rise ever since. But while the total amount that companies are spending is up, there are actually fewer computer and Internet businesses and industry groups that are lobbying, down 30%  from 2007.

Last year also saw another milestone: For the first time, Google surpassed Microsoft as the top spender on lobbying within the Internet and computer industry. That year it spent much of its lobbying efforts on the category that CISPA fell into: Copyright, Patent & Trademark.

Lobbying data from Opensecrets.org. Capitol photo courtesy of Shutterstock.

My son discovered Flickr today from Paul Mayne on Vimeo.

If you're a glutton for punishment, you can download the musical as an iPhone ringtone.

Digitals from Chris Crutchfield on Vimeo.

"Facebook was not originally created to be a company. It was built to accomplish a social mission - to make the world more open and connected.

We think it's important that everyone who invests in Facebook understands what this mission means to us, how we make decisions and why we do the things we do. I will try to outline our approach in this letter.

At Facebook, we're inspired by technologies that have revolutionized how people spread and consume information. We often talk about inventions like the printing press and the television -- by simply making communication more efficient, they led to a complete transformation of many important parts of society. They gave more people a voice. They encouraged progress. They changed the way society was organized. They brought us closer together.

Today, our society has reached another tipping point. We live at a moment when the majority of people in the world have access to the internet or mobile phones - the raw tools necessary to start sharing what they're thinking, feeling and doing with whomever they want. Facebook aspires to build the services that give people the power to share and help them once again transform many of our core institutions and industries.

There is a huge need and a huge opportunity to get everyone in the world connected, to give everyone a voice and to help transform society for the future. The scale of the technology and infrastructure that must be built is unprecedented, and we believe this is the most important problem we can focus on.

We hope to strengthen how people relate to each other.

Even if our mission sounds big, it starts small - with the relationship between two people.

Personal relationships are the fundamental unit of our society. Relationships are how we discover new ideas, understand our world and ultimately derive long-term happiness.

At Facebook, we build tools to help people connect with the people they want and share what they want, and by doing this we are extending people's capacity to build and maintain relationships.

People sharing more - even if just with their close friends or families - creates a more open culture and leads to a better understanding of the lives and perspectives of others. We believe that this creates a greater number of stronger relationships between people, and that it helps people get exposed to a greater number of diverse perspectives.

By helping people form these connections, we hope to rewire the way people spread and consume information. We think the world's information infrastructure should resemble the social graph - a network built from the bottom up or peer-to-peer, rather than the monolithic, top-down structure that has existed to date. We also believe that giving people control over what they share is a fundamental principle of this rewiring.

We have already helped more than 800 million people map out more than 100 billion connections so far, and our goal is to help this rewiring accelerate.

We hope to improve how people connect to businesses and the economy.

We think a more open and connected world will help create a stronger economy with more authentic businesses that build better products and services.

As people share more, they have access to more opinions from the people they trust about the products and services they use. This makes it easier to discover the best products and improve the quality and efficiency of their lives."

Photo by Silverisdead

The BossTracker5000 from Michael Shirley on Vimeo.

Back in 2010 we put together our first list of the 30 best and worst Web tech tattoos. Here's our latest compilation, including an augmented reality tattoo, HTML tags, Javascript and C++, Debian, Wordpress, Google, Microsoft, RFID, QR codes, even Bill Gates' face. If you have work that's better, or worse, show it off in the comments.

RIP Steve Jobs

Unix commands/C++/Javascript

Google

Microsoft

RFID

Augmented Reality

Android

HTML

Networks

Tux

Debian

QR Code/Shotcode

WordPress

Sources: Machine gun Tux: wrightzen; Jobs, left: Cult of Mac; Jobs, right: SODAPOP; RIP toe, Geeky Tattoos; Jobs, arm: Cult of Mac; Stay hungry, wrists: Speak Truth, Breath Love; Stay hungry, arm: Gristle Tattoo; Apple/Jobs icon: gadgetpolice.com; "There is no reason": wease.com; "One more thing": Cult of Mac; Unix commands: Geeky Tattoos; Google It: jessversus; Powered by Google: Geeky Tattoos; Windows XP: traviscostrrr; Windows: bremiclem; Bill Gates: Big Tattoo Planet; RFID: The Loom; Augmented reality: iheartchaos.com; Android: eagyn; Android skateboard: the brand show; HTML body: iamdonte; : interbent; : interbent; CCIE: knuckletattoos.com; Tux: Sabrina Ricci; Debian arm: MicheleM_; Debian back: NiNiaX; QR code: Geeky Tattoos; ShotCode: Ad Lab; Wordpress: Hugo Baeta

I was right that the number of people blogging would continue to fall, but I was wrong that a digital news company was going to acquire a major legacy news organization. We were wrong about a few other things, too: Mobile payments didn't become mainstream, we didn't write a post called "Flickr: In Memoriam," and there was no severe privacy breach at a location-based service.

What's in store for 2012? Here are a few of our predictions (and more of our misses from last year). Let us know your prognostications in the comments.

Abraham Hyatt, Managing Editor

1. The Associated Press released its automated style checking software this week; 2012 will see the rise of some kind of rudimentary fact-checking equivalent. Serious bloggers and journalists will flock to it but fact checking won't help the fact that there posts will stile bee filed with typos.
2. The relative success of the New York Times' paywall (and others) will drive more experiments in getting people to pay for online content. Thanks to the Times' example, a lot newspapers and magazines will realize their print product doesn't have to be an albatross around their neck. As a result of package print/digital deals, newspaper circulation rates will slow their fall? No, that can't be right.
3. The legacy journalism world finally began to steal ideas - accelerators, venture capital funds - that the tech world has been doing for many years. That adoption will continue at a depressingly slow rate in 2012.
What other 2011 predictions did we get wrong?

• Cablegate will pale in comparison to the secret information about governments and corporations that is released by Wikileaks and similar organizations, which will continue to crop up around the world.
• Fantastic new tools for analyzing and displaying big data will appear.
• Readers' Choice for Time's Person of the Year: Anonymous
• Telephony will continue to become more about messaging. Email, collaboration tools, activity stream technologies and other apps will further integrate with telephony APIs.
4. Curation tools like Instapaper will still be something that everyone likes, very few people do well, and only a infinitesimal few ever make money on. The long-awaited brawl between publishers and those tools will never happen. The audience for that kind of curation, while growing, will remain small in comparison to the number of people visiting those stories on the publishers' sites.
5. We will still be stuck with insidious buzzwords like gamification, filter bubble, clicktivism, robust and, *shudder*, mocial.

John Paul Titlow, Writer

1. Apple will release an HDTV set, but it will be little more than a television running the Apple TV flavor of iOS. The user experience will be nice, but the device won't kill cable or turn the industry on its head just yet.
2. Joining Zite, one of the other popular news reading apps for the iPad will be bought by a big tech or media company. These apps still won't be profitable.
3. By the June 2012, Instagram's user base will have doubled from what it is today. Its Android app, once it's finally released, will be a big help.
4. By the summer, Google TV will not in fact be included on the majority of new TV sets.
5. The iPhone 5 will launch and include NFC technology for mobile payments, contactless data transfer and other innovative uses. Apple's integration will begin to wow mainstream consumers, but the tech still won't be widely adopted for a few more years.
6. Location-based social networks like Foursquare will continue grow in popularity, but will still be a far cry from reaching mainstream status by the end of 2012. The concept will be made more palatable among everyday consumers thanks to their continued exposure to check-ins on Facebook and better promotional deals and coupons at local businesses for Foursquare users.
7. We'll see a substantial increase in HTML5-fueled mobile Web apps as companies and publishers learn that it frees them from app store restrictions and is cheaper since it offers cross-platform support without having to code for every mobile OS individually. Still, the iTunes App Store and Android Marketplace will also continue to grow.
8. At least three notable artists will pull their catalogs from Spotify, Rdio, MOG or all three over concerns about royalty payments.
9. Left in the dust in the mobile space and engaged in ongoing legal battles, Grooveshark will shut down or otherwise be rendered a shadow of its former self by the end of the year.
10. Your non-techie friends will finally start using Google+.

Dan Rowinski, Writer

1. Evernote will make a startlingly large acquisition that sets it up for mainstream success for years to come. Everyone will ask: how did Evernote get so much money?
2. Facebook's IPO will cause an exodus of top talent from the company that creates a new class of venture capitalist and entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley in much the same way as the "Google Millionaires" did a little less than a decade ago.
3. Google+ will become a truly international platform with more than150 million users. Most people will still decry it as useless.

4. A major corporation will get in trouble with privacy violations on a scale that most users cannot even fathom yet. Forget the Apple location tracking or whatever Facebook does or does not do. Carrier IQ could be the seed of this.
5. A U.S. President will be elected and the pundits will all say, "well, he/she had a really good social media campaign that carried them through the process."
6. Barack Obama will be reelected.
7. The city of Boston will have a couple high profile tech success stories and people will begin to say "Boston is back."
8. A major breakthrough in real artificial intelligence will be made at a university, large corporation or by the U.S. military.
9. The world will not end on Dec. 21, 2012. But, the spammers will make a fortune from the hysteria.
10. Either Hulu or Netflix will be acquired. One or the other, not both.

Jared Smith, Webmaster

1. Yahoo! finds a buyer. More Yahoo! properties are divested and sunset as a result.
2. Groupon sinks as quickly as it grew. Enthusiasm for daily deals comes back to earth.
3. Apple names the next iPhone something other than the iPhone 5.
4. Google+ becomes a legitimate contender for business collaboration, making Citrix sit up and take notice.
5. Flash survives 2012 on the desktop as a vehicle for video playback as Adobe builds and refines its tools for HTML5.

Joe Brockmeier, Writer

1. Microsoft will buy Netflix, and use Netflix as a driver for its Xbox and Windows 8 Tablets.
2. Twitter goes through at least one (more) major redesign, but keeps the character count at 140 as nature intended.
3. Yahoo will finally be sold to a surprise buyer.
4. Web series, like the short series Dr. Horrible and like "The Guild" will take off in a major way in 2012.

5. Reputation systems like Klout will flounder when people realize Klout "perks" are not worth playing the status anxiety game.
6. NFC payments, at least in North America, continue to be a niche offering. People are slow to adopt new payment options, and it will take years before NFC is widely accepted or used.
7. Mozilla launches its own, federated social network as an open and privacy friendly alternative to Facebook, Google+ and others.
8. Evernote introduces a file-sharing app or add-on that competes with Dropbox and Box.net.
9. Apple introduces its first actual television. The world recoils in horror at the price tag.
10. The "datapocalypse" caused by the shortage of hard drives following the Thailand floods impact cloud services. The price for online storage stays constant, or actually goes up.

OSCON, O'Reilly's annual convention devoted to everything open source, kicked off in Portland, Oregon this morning. The day will finish with OSCON Ignite. Ignite is the event series, born and bred by geeks, where speakers are limited to five minutes and 20, auto-advancing slides. Tonight's session tites include The Bad Touch, Barehanded Music Making and The Diabolical Developer. Full lists of sessions is below along with the video stream.

• The Bad Touch(1) - Damian Conway
• Cryptic Crosswords - Dan Bentley
• Barehanded Music Making - Piers Cawley
• Dealing with DevOps Antipatterns - Aaron Blew
• The Diabolical Developer - Martijn Verburg
• Oh, The Methods You'll Compose - Tim Berglund
• Basic UNIX must-know tools for the server-side Web programmer - Elle Suzuki
• Games and Puzzles and Ignite - Justin Martenstein

Photo by Khosrow on flickr

CEO Larry Page kicked off the earnings conference call and described not only the financial data but some other notable figures as well: the number of Google Plus users, how much they're sharing, how widely Chrome has been adopted and the current activation rate for Android devices.

• 10 million Google Plus users
• 1 billion items a day are being shared on Google Plus
• 160 million Chrome users
• 550,000 Android devices are being activated a day, with 160 million overall users
• +1 Button is being served 2.3 billion times a day
• $9.03 billion in gross revenue, up 32% from last year
• $6.23 billion in revenue from Google-owned sites

Page broke Google's projects into three different categories: search and advertising, which are the core drivers of the company's revenue stream; high-usage products like Chrome and YouTube; and new products like Google Plus, Commerce and Local.

Those emerging products aren't monitized, he said, but they can generate "huge new business" for Google over time. He stressed that the company has experience monitizing successful products on a long-term basis. But that growth is also dependent on high customer usage, a point he acknowledged as he talked about Google's future health.

"We have made a good start," he said, "but we are at only 1% of what's possible."

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