Remember when I cried over seeing something very cool at Microsoft Research?

Well now you can cry too, because the World Wide Telescope is now up.

Still is stunning, even a few months later.

Here’s the FastCompany interview where we meet the two guys who got this built and is what led me to declare I was crying.

I am playing with the new Google Reader for iPhone. Where am I playing with it? I’m sitting in the middle of Google’s campus. I’m still very disappointed. Here’s some of my disappointment:

1. Can’t share items from top level, like I can on Web page.
2. Can’t add notes to items, like I can on Web page.
3. I can’t see my friends, like I can on Web page.

I won’t tell you what I’m using on my iPhone instead cause I’ve already hyped them up too much.

UPDATE: see the comments here for an answer from the Reader Team (Mihai Parparita, engineer, told me how to see my friends).

PS: I still love the Google Reader web edition, just find the iPhone edition to have limited utility for me. You might like it though. Some of my Twitter friends say that’s how they read all their feeds (I bias my life around sharing feed items, so making me click through items to share makes me mad).

BBC: Twitter and the China earthquake.

I reported the major quake to my followers on Twitter before the USGS Website had a report up and about an hour before CNN or major press started talking about it. Now there’s lots of info over on Google News.

How did I do that? Well, I was watching Twitter on Google Talk. Several people in China reported to me they felt the quake WHILE IT WAS GOING ON!!!

Over the next two hours I pointed at anyone who had info about the quake on my Twitter account.

It’s amazing the kind of news you can learn by being on Twitter and the connections you can make among people across the world.

I fear a large casualty loss. The epicenter was 50 miles from Chengdu, which has about 10.5 million residents. Already reports are coming across of buildings that have been knocked down.

dtan was the first Twitterer I saw talking about the quake. This was my first post in reaction to him.

UPDATE: Online Journalism Blog has a lot more details about what happened on Twitter tonight. From the Frontline blog has even more.

UPDATE2: Global Voices Online has links to videos and other Twitter and blog reports.

UPDATE3: here’s a timeline of what first Tweets looked like.