With so many social networking sites, from Myspace to Youtube, Flickr to the increasingly popular Facebook, it’s difficult to keep track of your friends and acquaintances - that is until Wink.com came around. Wink.com is a people search engine, you type in the name of someone you know and the search results list all the networks that person belongs to as well as any other general mentions of the name on the Internet.

ou’ve probably already heard the news about Bill Gate’s new gadget the Touch Screen Table, but perhaps you’d like to get a closer look at the technology behind it. Check out some of the work that was going on in early 2006 at NYU. The video clip on that site gives you a strong sense of the type of technology that we’ll probably be using on a daily basis within the next 10 years. Bill Gate’s idea is to develop an interactive environment in which the interface between computers and human users is seemlessly integrated into our homes, offices and even around town. This idea has been around for a long time, and it otherwise referred to as ‘Uniquitous Computing’, read this interesting paper for more in-depth information on ubiquitous computing. While Bill Gates doesn’t necessarily bring any new ideas to the table on this one, he brings one thing alot of researchers and developers lack: money, and lots of it. He also brings solid market research and customer usability preferences developed over decades of running Microsoft’s propietary web browser Internet Explorer.

This is the fascinating story from IEEE Spectrum Online about how the original design plans for the city of New York differ with the reality of the city as it is today. The article looks at a cross section of today’s New York and discusses the developments in visions of city living vs their implementation. For a good visual image of what this is all about go here. For more information on other cities and particularly the excellent guide on how to handle a ‘megacity’ go here.