Facebook vs. Twitter vs. Google Buzz is far from a perfect comparison, but won’t you help me fill in this chart?

Earlier on Google Buzz I asked if cities can make pitches to Google to get in on the 1Gbps fiber-to-the-home connections that company plans on bringing to as many as 500,000 people. I assume no one saw that because it was on Google Buzz, but I digress.

Turns out cities can apply here.

Stacey Higginbotham suggested Austin, Texas get in on the action.

I think Austin needs to let Minneapolis have some fun for once.

Cities have until March 26 to respond. So how do me make this happen? Who do we call? Who gets the City Hall interested in this?

Amazon Web Services is the only business I can think of that regularly e-mails me to tell me they’ve lowered their prices. Kudos.

Since you didn’t ask, here’s just a handful of things I’ve read about the iPad the past few days. Be sure to read the top two. 

In the New World, computers are task-centric. We are reading email, browsing the web, playing a game, but not all at once. Applications are sandboxed, then moats dug around the sandboxes, and then barbed wire placed around the moats. As a direct result, New World computers do not need virus scanners, their batteries last longer, and they rarely crash, but their users have lost a degree of freedom. New World computers have unprecedented ease of use, and benefit from decades of research into human-computer interaction. They are immediately understandable, fast, stable, and laser-focused on the 80% of the famous 80/20 rule.

Is the New World better than the Old World? Nothing’s ever simply black or white.

—Old World vs. New World computing 

Used to be you could argue that Flash, whatever its merits, delivered content to the entire audience you cared about. That’s no longer true, and Adobe’s Flash penetration is shrinking with each iPhone OS device Apple sells.

What’s Hulu going to do? Sit there and wait? Whine about the blue boxes? Or do the practical thing and write software that delivers video to iPhone OS? The answer is obvious. Hulu doesn’t care about what’s good for Adobe. They care about what’s good for Hulu. Hulu isn’t a Flash site, it’s a video site. Developers go where the users are.

—Who Can Do Something About Those Blue Boxes?

The Killer App: iPad Board Games

Why My Mom’s Next Computer Is Going To Be An iPad

HTML5 is Great for Mobile, Developers Say

Web developers can rule the iPad

Why Bigger Is Better: The iPad And The Arc of Computing

How many icons on that iPad dock?

What the iPad Tells Us About Mobile Broadband Pricing

The iPad Will Make Apple’s Acquisition Of Quattro Wireless Look Even Smarter

5 Things The iPhone Could Learn From The iPad

Various and Assorted Thoughts and Observations Regarding the Just-Announced iPad

A new class of content for a new class of device

Until now I hadn't seen any actual admission from Apple that the iPad doesn't support Flash. Sure, Flash was clearly missing when Steve Jobs demoed The New York Times' site on the device Wednesday, but that could have simply been a result of demoing nonfinal software. The shipping version of the iPad could certainly support Flash.

When the original Tweetie for Mac was released it was easily the best Twitter client that had ever been. I loved the Zen simplicity of it, and when Tweetie for iPhone was released I quickly became a fan.

Since then, Tweetie for Mac hasn’t changed one bit. No geolocation. No lists. No retweets. And as much as I’m not a fan of TweetDeck, it has become my de facto standard on the desktop.

On iPhone, the story’s a little more complicated. When Tweetie 2 was released, I thought it was great — a natural progression from the already-great 1.0. But within a few minutes I started to notice problems. It was like my phone had amnesia. After a couple weeks of Tweetie 2, I had to give up and move to EchoFon. I feel the same way about EchoFon that I do about TweetDeck — it’s extremely clunky and doesn’t have nearly the user experience of Tweetie. But it works.

For a while I would still go back to Tweetie 2 for one-off tasks. But no more. Tweetie 2 has completely died on my iPhone. It has refused to update the main timeline for a month and a half now. Ridiculous.

I hope Tweetie’s developer gives me a reason to come back.

The New York Times has this deal for a $100 off a Samsung Go netbook when you purchase a one-year Times Reader subscription ($179.40). And the Times has an iPad-ready app; I wonder if we’ll see a similar deal when the iPad launches.

Gowalla today opened up the ability to plans trips to all users, which should save a lot of confusion for newbies. Until today I assumed I *could* make a trip and was simply too dumb to figure out how.

I made my first trip called Minneapolis Beer Tour with seven venues (which coincidently is the perfect number for taking this screen shot). You can add up to 20 venues to a trip; what am I missing?

More on Gowalla trips.

Update: It seems you can’t add venues to a trip after you’ve published it. Boo!

During today’s iPad unveiling, Steve Jobs positioned Apple in two interesting new ways.

The first was as a mobile devices company. iPod, iPhone and now the iPad is their flagship line of products. MacBooks too are somewhat mobile devices. Now I don’t think Apple will be discontinuing their iMac, Mac Pro or Final Cut Studio businesses anytime soon, which makes his other statement all the more interesting.

To my argument that Apple will buy Yahoo! you can add Steve positioning Apple as a company at the intersection of technology and liberal arts. It seems to me picking up Yahoo!’s content and social network businesses would really help out that image.

I may be the only one who wasn’t full of anticipation for today’s iPad announcement. Not that I didn’t think it had the potential to be mind-blowing (it isn’t), but as a first-generation iPhone owner who is more than ready for a faster, more featured handheld, all I was really hoping for was a new iPhone to show up the Nexus One.