In wishing Twitter a happy birthday, the Twitter staff came out in droves to tweet links to the new site.  I counted 10 to 15 tweets similar to this in the span of an hour or so:

The site offers snapshots of 16 celebrities who are on Twitter and asks you to follow them.  Speaker of the House John Boehner, Larry King replacement Piers Morgan and fashionista Rachel Zoe are among the featured few.  The bottom of the page also displays links to browse popular interests like entertainment, politics and technology.

Front and center on the new page is a 3 minute video that asks some of the aforementioned celebrities questions about their interests on Twitter and who they follow.  Hillary Clinton tells us it’s a great place for information while Snoop Dogg lets the world know he follows Martha Stewart.  Check out the video below.

The video is hosted by character actor, Ray Wise, which provides a stylized pseudo-documentary feel. Of course, Soulja Boy makes a cameo as well. Enjoy. Oh, apparently Twitter was created by Ashton Kutcher and hipsters.

(WARNING: NSFW Language)

The museum in Amsterdam is not furnished as the secret annex was cleared of its contents after those in hiding were arrested. After the war, it was Otto Frank’s wish that the rooms should  remain empty. The online hiding place allows visitors to see and learn more about various objects not on view. The virtual rooms were furnished using reference photographs that were taken in 1999 when the front part of the house and the secret annex were temporarily re-furnished.

The microsite is full of richly descriptive video clips, telling the story of Anne Frank through diary excerpts and archived witness reports. The English voice-overs are by Tamsin Greig and Ellie Kendrick, both of whom were involved in the 2009 BBC series “The Diary of Anne Frank”. Atmospheric music was kindly provided by Mark Isham, the American Grammy and Emmy Award-winning composer perhaps best known for his work on ‘Crash’ and ‘A River Runs Through It’.

To spread the story of Anne Frank through social media channels, there is also a Facebook application. Selected quotes from Anne’s diary can be posted to your profile weekly or monthly, spreading her words of inspiration.

The Secret Annex Online is Web Pick of the Week on Commarts, and was Site of the Day on FWA (Favourite Website Awards). More info can be found via the press release on RealWire.

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The cake, which is pictured on the Official Google Blog, doesn’t look as enormous as the one that commemorated the New York office’s first anniversary; in this respect, the third anniversary of the Seattle/Kirkland office disappoints me.  In other ways, though, Google’s employees in Washington seem to be much better off.

Steve Yegge, a software engineer, writes, “Kirkland is a lovely city nestled on Lake Washington, with views of the water, the Seattle skyline, and of course Mount Rainier, which is by far the area’s most impressive (and hopefully most dormant) volcano.”

Also, “we have no state tax,” and “[w]e have three lovely ski resorts within an hour’s drive, including Snoqualmie Pass, the nation’s largest night-skiing facility.  And the world-famous Whistler/Blackcomb resort is just a few hours’ drive across the Canadian border.”

Most of us can appreciate these things from a distance.  Those of you who live nearby might have a shot at appreciating them and getting in on next year’s celebration, though – Yegge also states, “[W]e’re always looking for great people to help us out.”

Google Bakes A Gigantic Cake

“To commemorate the first anniversary of our New York office in its current space, we decided to think big — a giant scale-model cake of the entire block-long building,” announced Kevin McConvey, a cafe director, on the Official Google Blog.  “Our facilities manager, Laura Gimpel, and I came up with a plan to construct this tasty treat and serve it at last Thursday’s anniversary celebration.”

That plan, which McConvey went on to lay out, involved four days, seven people, 630 eggs, 105 pounds of sugar, and 20 pounds of butter.  “The finished product was five feet long, three feet high and two feet wide,” he reported.  “Now that’s a lot of cake!”

And, as you can (usually) trust Google to do, the company let nothing go to waste; the last of the ginormous treat disappeared on Friday evening.

Now, I’m not sure that the cake did anyone’s waistline or blood pressure much good, and health enthusiasts may wholeheartedly object to the project.  But the pleasure of working for Google probably makes up for some of that stuff.  And in any event, I’m with McConvey, who concluded, “I can’t wait to see what we do when our office turns two.”

As I mentioned in FIR #173 last week, I’m returning to the UK after seven years in Amsterdam. New thinking, new ideas, new ventures. More about that later.

Things here are a bit upside down side this week, packing cases and boxes everywhere as we finalize packing for the movers later in the week. I won’t be online here much as I take care of such things.

Anyway, driving back to Amsterdam yesterday, I used the time in the car to catch up with a load of podcast listening. Geek News Central, Managing The Gray, Caribbean Free Radio, The M Show, Ritmo Latino, Across The Sound, Daily Source Code, even a couple of back episodes of FIR that I haven’t had a chance to listen to.

What made the listening experience outstanding was being able to hear the podcasts from my iPod on the car stereo system via the Griffin Roadtrip, a very cool gadget that transmits the audio to the car radio on a spare FM frequency. I picked one up at Schiphol airport on Saturday.

It works with any iPod model except the Shuttle, not only enabling you to listen to your audio but also charging your iPod.

Forget burning those podcasts to CD. Forget earbuds and cables. Forget contraptions like special cassettes (and who has a casette player in their car these days?). Unless you have a car with an in-built iPod connector, this has got to be the only way to listen to audio from your iPod when in a car.

Speaking of podcasting, the third anniversary of this medium passed at the weekend, on Saturday September 23.

According to Dave Winer, widely regarded as one of the two people who made it happen (the other being Adam Curry):

[] Today is, in a sense, the three-year anniversary of podcasting. It wasn’t called podcasting then, but all the essential elements of what would become podcasting were in place. A regular show with a theme (Chris Lydon inteviewing people he finds interesting), a feed that has those shows as enclosures. The enclosures are in MP3 format. And a small number of aggregators that could do something interesitng with all that. A step down the road that would lead to podcasting.

When this became a juggernaut, almost exactly a year after the first Lydon feed, it desperately needed a name. Danny G came up with “podcast” and we liked it, so that was it, the decision was made, a “rough consensus” formed, and from then on we called what we were doing podcasting.

Read Dave’s complete post for more history, especially related to the role the iPod played in the naming (does this explain why Apple wants to own the name?)

I first heard of podcasting on September 30, 2004. Shel and I announced FIR on December 21, 2004 and we recorded the first episode on January 3, 2005.

What a lot of water under the bridge in so short a time.

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Promoters of the Y Design Awards have chosen Adobe’s Flash technology as the focus of their competition. The contest calls for the most innovative uses of Flash across ten categories, as listed on the contest’s website:

•  Best game design
•  Best interactive site
•  Best application
•  Best online campaign by an agency with less than 5 employees
•  Best online campaign by an agency with more than 5 employees
•  Best not-for-profit campaign
•  Best viral campaign
•  Best video
•  Best technical achievement
•  People’s Choice for best use of Flash

Submitters may enter the competition as many times as they wish in as many categories as they choose. There is no cost to enter the contest. A five-judge panel will select four finalists in each category, with winners to be announced at a special awards event in London on September 25th.

As might be expected, Adobe is sponsoring the event. This is also the tenth anniversary of Flash, which Adobe recognized with a dedicated microsite.

Adobe also has an online contest coming up on its final round of voting. The Flash Awards will recognize the most influential Flash site of the decade.

After the final cuts have been made, voting on the overall winner for The Flash Awards begins on August 30th.

On the Linux side of Flash, hope continues that Flash Player 9 will eventually see the light of day. Mike Melanson has blogged about the progress with that effort:

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Wired News reported the tenth anniversary of Flash ticked by on August 8th. Its history has taken it from a future in the Tablet PC niche to placement on millions of computers worldwide.

Figures from a NPD Online survey cited by Adobe claim a penetration of almost 98 percent of the global personal computer market. Flash has become a choice of developers and content providers in a very broad fashion.

That adoption probably can be traced to technology changes made to Flash over the years. Mike Downey, Flash senior product manager, said in Wired News that the addition of the scripting engine, ActionScript, and video support in versions 4, 5, and 6 respectively, has driven Flash over time.

Online video on sites like YouTube and others can be embedded thanks to Flash. The increase of broadband usage in the US and other places has pushed the demand for video and rich media content. Flash has benefited from this shift.

Adobe interviewed a number of developers and designers for its Flash Anniversary website. Developer Aran Balkan predicted that within ten years, Ajax developers would ditch that methodology for Flash:

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This one marks last week’s 100th anniversary of the San Francisco earthquake.

The actual coding is impressive. Cable cars and a plane move about the map, buildings catch on fire, and all the images are far too cartoony for a major natural disaster.

But the real treat comes when the actual map shakes. Yeah, it simulates the earthquake by shaking the map. As the author, Brian Morearty, explains, he was just trying to see if he could get a map to shake, and with the hundreth anniversary, he put two and two together. So I forgive, and after all, it could be worse. Someone is going to do a Holocaust mashup eventually, and you know it.

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Findory founder Greg Linden posted the milestone in his blog recently. The Findory service also achieved another mark: “When I finished the bookkeeping for this month, I was pleased to discover that Findory was also cash flow positive (by a few dollars) in December 2005,” Linden wrote.

With Findory, users build a personalized view of the news by clicking on articles to read. Each time a user reads particular topics, the service adjusts to present stories that its algorithm finds relevant to that user’s preferences. The top of the Findory screen notes the number of articles read, searches made, and favorites marked by the user.

Users returning to Findory may see articles marked with a small icon like the one appearing over the ‘i’ in Findory’s logo. The icon means that article is one Findory’s engine has selected based on the user’s previous history on the site.

Unlike other personalization services like Google’s or Yahoo’s, Findory does not require users to login to see personalized articles.

Linden also noted that traffic levels for Findory are roughly equal to sites like Rojo, Memeorandum, and Microsoft’s Start.com.

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