Thank you Pakistan, says Facebook

Mumbai, April 26 -- Trust social networking sites to not miss a chance to have a say in any heated current topic. Fan pages and messages on two popular sites - Facebook and Twitter - are fast becoming an ideal place for Internet junkies to vent.

Facebook reportedly has over 90 fan pages on Sania Mirza and her much talked about wedding to Pakistani cricketer, Shaoib Mallik. The page called 'Thank you Pakistan for taking Sania Mirza, now please take Rakhi Sawant also' has earned itself over 65,000 fans in a matter of two weeks. It currently has over 75,000 people supporting the statement.

And the popularity of the other group,'Throw away Shashi Tharoor and Lalit Modi', only puts in perspective how much importance the public spat between the two political figures is actually being given. As against the 65,000 fans for Sania's group, this page has only 30-odd members.

The category of this group proudly falls under Common Interest - Politics, while the description is 'throw away these un required people.' The topics of conversation on either site concern young enthusiasts making fun of how both the issues were given reverence on national news.

While a part of the page has also become a ground for debate between Internet junkies from both the neighbouring nations on various topics, the albums have been loaded with images of Rakhi Sawant and one of her alleged forced kiss with Mika Singh as well.

Dot-com marks 25th anniversary

It is hard to remember the days before the doc-com revolution. Twenty-Five years ago on march 15, 1985 - the first doc-com domain name, Symbolics.com, appeared on the internet, ushering in the commercial age of the World Wide Web, the CNN reported.
Having a domain name made it simpler for the average person to access a website. Development was slow, at first, as it took more than two years for the first 100 websites and domain names to go online; by 1995 the number had grown to 18,000 websites. Today, the internet and World Wide Web has grown to more than 80 million doc-com domain names, according to the information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF).

Twitter hits Library of Congress: Would Founding Fathers tweet?

Washington: From Thomas Jefferson's library to Twitter – the US Library of Congress marches on.

Yes, the institution that in 1815 bought 6,487 of Jefferson's books to restore holdings burned in the War of 1812 announced on Thursday that it will archive every public tweet sent since March 2006.

Twitter's files have extraordinary potential to help anyone researching contemporary life, said Librarian of Congress James Billington in a statement announcing the move.

"Anyone who wants to understand how an ever-broadening public is using social media to engage in an ongoing debate regarding social and cultural issues will have need of this material," said Mr. Billington.

Hmm – by our count that sentence is about 180 characters. And it's clipped from a quote that's a whole paragraph. Billington is going to have to start tightening things up if he's going to get in the 140-character-per-message Twitter spirit.

Jefferson got $23,940 for his stacks when the Library of Congress bought them to replace material the British had torched. The books included works of history, literature, and natural philosophy in a number of languages.

Thucydides translated from Greek into English by Thomas Hobbes, Plutarch in Latin – that sort of thing.

Now these will be supplemented with, among other things, the tweets of Canadian pop star Justin Bieber. ("...Time for school. Back to learning. Haha.")

To be fair, the Library of Congress has long collected oral history and things that historians call "ephemera" as a means of tracking cultural changes. It has archived man-on-the-street interviews taken after the bombing of Pearl Harbor and the terrorist attacks of 9/11, among other things.

The tweet sent by Barack Obama after learning of his election might fit right in with such material, as will tweets from Iranian dissidents and others around the world fighting oppression.

"I think Twitter will be one of the most informative resources available on modern-day culture, including economic, social and political trends, as well as consumer behavior and social trends," said Margot Gerritsen, a Stanford professor who's working with the Library of Congress on the stewardship of digital material, in a statement.

More than 140 characters again. These people are going to have to learn to pare down.

So, just for fun, if Twitter had been established in 1776, how would US history be different? Or sound different, at least?

@TJefferson: "Working on new project: All men are created ... the same? Doesn't quite sound right. Help me out, tweeps."

@HonestAbe: "Excerpt from upcoming speech at @Gettysburg63: Gov. of peeps, by peeps, for peeps, 4ever. More here: http://honesta.be/getty1863"

@JFK: "Ask not what @USA can do for you ... ask what you can do for @USA."

High blood pressure tied to dementia

Hypertension was linked to one of two types of mild cognitive impairment, a condition that can foreshadow the development of dementia, but not the type strongly associated with Aizheimer's diseases, according to a study published in the journal archives of Neurology.
People with mild cognitive impairment can have difficulties with language, memory, attention span or other mental functions significant enough to be noticeable to other people and to be detected in tests.
The elderly people with high blood pressure in this study often had a form of mild cognitive impairment that can be a precursor to vascular dementia, the second most common form of dementia after Aizheimer's disease. It is often associated with stroke. High blood pressure raises the risk for stroke.

iPad versus iPhone: Which had the better opening weekend?

Apple has confirmed its iPad sales figures. They don't match iPhone 3GS numbers, but Wall Street is happy.

The iPad sales figures are in. Apple reported this morning that it sold more than 300,000 iPads on Saturday, the same day the tablet computer debuted.

This tally includes US pre-orders that arrived on people's doorsteps this weekend and copies sold in Apple stores.

New iPad owners quickly got to work tinkering with their new device: Shoppers downloaded more than 1 million iPad apps on Saturday and purchased more than 250,000 ebooks.

“It feels great to have the iPad launched into the world – it’s going to be a game changer,” Apple CEO Steve Jobs says in a statement. “iPad users, on average, downloaded more than three apps and close to one book within hours of unpacking their new iPad.”

Not bad for less than 24 hours. But how does it stack up to the Apple iPhone? The answer depends on which model you compare the iPad to.

A month after the original launched in June 2007, AT&T counted 146,000 iPhones running on its network. Wall Street consensus expected a number several times larger. But from this slow beginning, Apple picked up considerable speed. Just a few months later, the iPhone and iPod Touch collectively became the fastest-adopted gadgets in history.

Apple went on to sell 1 million iPhones in 74 days. The Motorola Droid later beat that record, but Apple raced into the lead again with the release of later iPhones. Shoppers snapped up 1 million copies of the iPhone 3G in the first three days, and another 1 million iPhone 3GS units during its opening weekend.

But this is when comparisons to the iPad break down. You could argue that Apple's tablet computer should be compared to the later iPhones. The iPad is just the logical progression of the touch-screen device that Steve Jobs first presented in 2007. Don't reset the counter and declare the iPad more successful than the original iPhone just because this new device is larger.

However these numbers aren't apples-to-apples comparisons (har har). The iPhone 3G and 3GS went on sale in more than 20 countries. Saturday's 300,000 only includes the US. Plus, plenty of the American 3G and 3GS sales came from people stuck or extending their 2-year contract with AT&T by upgrading their current iPhone to something with better features. This means they already had a built-in user base, unlike the iPad, which harmonizes well but is no replacement for the phone. Not to mention, the 3G editions of the iPad don't come out until later this month.

Perhaps it's still too early to make any real comparisons – especially since the original iPhone took time to build momentum. We'll check in again after 74 days. But Wall Street is already happy.

"The strong initial demand for the new device led Deutsche Bank analyst Chris Whitmore to raise his earnings forecast and price target for Apple stock," reports the Mercury News. "Whitmore, whose firm has done non-investment banking work for Apple in the last year, now expects Apple's stock to hit $325 a share, up from a previous target of $250."