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...
Beginning during the first half of 2010 Yahoo users will be able to to combine their activity streams between yahoo and Facebook. Currently the Yahoo homepage allows visitors to check their Facebook stream in a preview window without leaving the site. "At some point in the first half of 2010, Yahoo users will be able to see their friends' Facebook activities directly within "Yahoo updates", while activity on Yahoo sites like Flickr may be automatically re-posted to the Facebook news feed ." The most important debate that has popped up is this. Who will be the primary social identity on the web. Facebook wants to be No1. with FB connect and so does Google with it's friend connect. Fb has since changed the whole scene. With it's 350 million users it can now be separate and other sites would need to collaborate with it, instead of the other way around. Yahoo stands to gain from this deal rather than the other way around. What happens then to OpenID. Which ...