On Thursday, Donald Trump will walk into the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, shake Xi Jinping's hand, and declare it a great meeting. There will be announcements. There will be numbers — billions of dollars in Chinese purchase commitments, a new bilateral mechanism with an important-sounding name, possibly a joint statement on Iran. Trump will post on Truth Social. Markets will rally briefly. Pundits will argue about who won. None of that will tell you what actually happened. What is actually happening in Beijing this week is something more consequential and more uncomfortable than the summit theatre will reveal: two leaders of two deeply mutually dependent superpowers, both of whom need this meeting to succeed for entirely different reasons, sitting across a table in a world that has already moved past the assumptions that defined their last nine months of negotiations. The Iran war changed the equations. The rare earth gambit changed the power balance. Taiwan is sitting in...
Facebook Connect now reaches 60 million users via 80,000 web sites. “We don’t aspire to be only a web site,” said Ethan Beard, director of the Facebook Developer Network. “We aspire to be a technology that allows people to connect people with the things they care about.” It was also pointed out that 2 years ago 70% of Facebook's uses came from within the US. The figure has since changed with 70% of FB's audience coming from outside the US. "More than 80,000 websites and devices (including iPhone and Xbox) have implemented Facebook Connect since it launched in December 2008, says Beard. And more than 60 million Facebook users use Facebook Connect each month."