There’s a social media revolution going on, and it’s bigger than most people think. It’s not 1999, it’s closer to 1997, and Zynga is one of the companies leading the revolution. Our $5 billion value represents 75% upside to where the shares are trading today.

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I haven’t checked it out yet but Dropico sounds pretty sweet to me on paper (web paper?).

Via Betanews:

Dropico is a new rich Web application that lets users manage their photo albums from Facebook, Twitter, Picasa, Flickr, Photobucket, Myspace, and Bebo all in one central location with a simple drag and drop interface.

Users pair their accounts from those sites with Dropico, and then they can pull photos off of one site, edit them, and pipe them down to another site quickly and easily. Additionally, users can pull photos from their friends or favorite profiles and move them to other sites. For example, if you follow the Library of Congress’ Flickr stream and you discover something that you really like, you can drag it from the Flickr window over to the Twitter window and post it to your Twitter feed via yfrog, twitgoo, or twitpic.

An account on Dropico comes with a free .mobi email address associated with your login info. With that, you can mail photos to yourself and they’ll show up in your Dropico mobile folder. While it is certainly a handy feature, it is only of limited usefulness since pictures must be sent one by one by devices with email capabilities.

Other devices such as Eye-Fi connected cameras or the Nintendo DSi (which can upload pictures directly to Facebook) cannot take advantage of this feature. It’s just as well though, since their content is received through Dropico’s connection with other sites.

Watch them owning each other during the ‘mad vote scramble’

I’m going to have to watch that again to find out what they are voting on (if it goes into that).

These guys are voting to pass laws in Texas? That is rather… interesting…

Download the full NBP here!

National broadband goals

* Goal 1: At least 100 million U.S. homes should have affordable access to actual download speeds of at least 100 megabits per second and actual upload speeds of at least 50 megabits per second.

* Goal 2: The United States should lead the world in mobile innovation, with the fastest and most extensive wireless networks of any nation.

* Goal 3: Every American should have affordable access to robust broadband service, and the means and skills to subscribe if they so choose.

* Goal 4: Every community should have affordable access to at least 1 Gbps broadband service to anchor institutions such as schools, hospitals and government buildings.

* Goal 5: To ensure the safety of Americans, every first responder should have access to a nationwide public safety wireless network.

* Goal 6: To ensure that America leads in the clean energy economy, every American should be able to use broadband to track and manage their real-time energy consumption.

From the Article (click here):

This update is about performance and stability again. We are not doing any changes to the game’s datafiles.

Reduced input “lag”
On machines where the CPU would out-run the GPU, sometimes the GPU would queue up several frames’ worth of rendering commands.
This could lead to the game having a high framerate, but input still feeling very sluggish.
Now there’s a limiter on how many frames the CPU is allowed to be “ahead” of the GPU.
Control this setting via Settings.ini. Default setting: RenderAheadLimit=2

* Performance optimizations with biggest improvements on dual-core machines
* Fixed black “masks”

The soot on buildings with holes in them had a bugged renderpath. We switched that over to a more well-tested renderpath.

* Improved hit-detection

We’ve gone through the hit detection logic, and client+server will now give more consistent results.

* Fix for some “rubberbanding” issues

C4 should stay attached to vehicles and not rubberband around

* Reduced spikes/dips in framerate
* Various fixes for alt+tab related CTD on Dx9
* More fixes for random CTD on Dx9
* Fix for crash when you’re in a vehicle that gets destroyed

There was a race condition in the code;
System 1 thought “oh hey, you’re leaving vehicle X”
System 2 thought “the vehicle got destroyed, let’s remove it”

If system 2 ran before system 1, chaos would ensue.
This was actually fixed in the retail version since a month, but it was only when we got detailed crash reports from the community that we understood *why* the Beta was crashing.

Likely bugs in this build
I wouldn’t be surprised if it (still) has trouble remembering your settings between rounds. It would be nice to have that fixed too, but it’s better to get a patch out now, and look at the settings issues afterward.

-Mikael Kalms