Here are my weekly notes:
- My parents have been in town for the last few days, so it’s been good to spend some time with them. Last night Sharon and I took them to Hardware Grill for dinner, and to Illuminations afterward. They really enjoyed both, and so did we!
- Microsoft’s MIX 09 event happened this week, which means there was lots of news for developers. Colin has a nice roundup here.
- I agree with Scott Hanselman, we totally need FizzBin – the technical support secret handshake. Probably a better idea in theory than in practice, however.
- Is Twitter the savior of journalism? Or something like it? Lots of great discussion by Dave Winer lately.
- If you’re a regular Facebook user, you’ve no doubt seen the latest redesign by now. Seems most people dislike it. I don’t really care one way or another. I like this post by Robert Scoble on the issue though: Why Facebook has never listened and why it definitely won’t start now.
- Speaking of Facebook, I’d love to have a vanity URL (facebook.com/mastermaq). Yes, even despite all of the great reasons that Chris Messina has laid out for why we shouldn’t have vanity URLs.
- As you may have seen this week, Cisco purchased Pure Digital, maker of the Flip video camera, for $590 million in stock. Lots of theories about what they are going to do with it, but no one really knows. I bet even Cisco doesn’t know!
- Nielsen says that unique visitors to Twitter increased 1382 percent year-over-year, to 7 million in February 2009. Not bad!
MasterMaq's Blog 
I wouldn’t say that you shouldn’t have vanity URLs, only that they’re a distraction, especially for Facebook. I’m sure that they’ll offer them on a more general basis some day, probably as a domain-name-like market where you can buy the exclusive rights to some friendly/vanity name on facebook.com… but it just seems silly to me when there are much more interesting ways to solve the problem that these kinds of URLs seem to aim to solve.
Fair enough – thanks for the comment Chris!