The Thinking Mechanism is a series of weekly posts, published on Fridays, covering the ideas The Mechanism is thinking and talking about with our peers and clients.

This week members of our London team have been working out of the New York office leading to many interesting conversations about technology, development and the future of creative digital work. Mostly because during this week, and next, a lot of industry changing announcements are taking place. This week the D9 Conference is happening and next week is Apple's World Wide Developers Conference.

Here are some of the things we've learned so far:

• In a rare and unexpected break from their absolute secrecy Apple pre-announced the content of their WWDC keynote. We now know Steve Jobs will be back for the presentation. There will be no new hardware, certainly no new iPhone announcement. The keynote will focus on software, specifically Mac OS X Lion, iOS 5, and will introduce iCloud, a potential replacement for MobileMe and music locker. They also released iPhone versions of the iWork suite of apps ahead of the conference. They have certainly gone out of their way to manage expectations. If all the rumors floating about are to be believed Apple is up to something big.

• Microsoft demoed Windows 8 (video) which introduces a new tile-based interface based on the Windows Phone.

• Twitter introduced the Follow button, which allows one click follows without having to leave the page you are in. It also introduced photo and video sharing within Twitter (video,) a full of potential extension to the service that transforms hashtags beyond keywords and trends into galleries. Twitter may even be baked into iOS 5.

• Google releases the +1 button to the web. One more button to add to pages, to blogs, to the online ecosystem. Although it comes late to the social media party the +1 button has the advantage of actually influencing the Google search algorithm, possibly leading to improved SEO. For that reason alone it may be embraced.

• Former Google CEO and current Board member Eric Schmidt introduced the phrase "The Gang of Four," or how he refers to Google, Apple, Amazon, and Facebook. This cabal of frenemies has highly successful partnerships in some areas and aggressively competitive pursuits in others. And together they are inventing the future. Notably absent from Schmidt's "Gang" - is Microsoft...

• If you were in Jonathan Kaplan's shoes and experienced Cisco buying your Flip line of consumer cameras only to abruptly discontinue them, what would you do? He is going into high-tech grilled cheeses.

• And speaking of dairy products, is White Power Milk a joke, performance art, political satire, a student project, a viral for Yakult? Only Nate Hill knows for sure.

The Thinking Mechanism is a series of weekly posts, published on Fridays, covering the ideas The Mechanism is thinking and talking about with our peers and clients.

In the U.S. this weekend is Memorial Day weekend, the official start of summer. Many people travel to visit family and friends or just to take their first trip to the beach. In the spirit of the holiday weekend we are going to do something different. Instead of sharing the items we've been talking about we are going to introduce you to two services we love and share items that you could enjoy while commuting to your destination or while taking some deserved time off.

Once you discover Instapaper you wonder how did you manage without it. Created by Marco Arment, co-founder of Tumblr and coffee aficionado, Instapaper is a simple tool to save web pages to read later. The text is stripped out of any web page and becomes available, via apps on most mobile devices, for you to read when you have the time. It is also available online through the Instapaper website. Instapaper is time-shifting for text, TiVo for words.

Longreads is the perfect compliment to Instapaper. Founded by Mark Armstrong, Longreads posts links to new stories every day — they include long-form journalism, magazine stories from your favorite publications (The New Yorker, Esquire, The Atlantic), short stories, interview transcripts, and even historical documents. The site has a brilliant search feature that allows you to filter articles based on length, so you can find the perfect article to read in the amount of time you have available.

In the age of Twitter and Facebook status updates, these two services encourage long-form reading. Here are some of the articles we'll be reading this weekend, as discovered through Longreads:

Error Message: Google Research Director Peter Norvig on Being Wrong
(Kathryn Schulz, Slate, Aug. 3, 2010)
Time to read: 16 minutes (4,050 words)
Norvig explains what happens when a company (in this case Google) takes an engineering-centric approach to its products and business. First, it means that errors are actually a good thing.

Apple & Design: The Man Who Makes Your iPhone
(Frederik Balfour and Tim Culpan, Businessweek, Sept. 9, 2010)
Time to read: 21 minutes (5,204 words)
Foxconn founder Terry Gou might be regarded as Henry Ford reincarnated if only a dozen of his workers hadn't killed themselves. An exclusive look inside a postmodern industrial empire.

Later: What Does Procrastination Tell Us About Ourselves?
(James Surowiecki, The New Yorker, Oct. 11, 2010)
Time to read: 14 minutes (3,574 words)
Take comfort in this exploration of the “basic human impulse” of putting work off.

Master of Play: Shigeru Miyamoto, Nintendo's Man Behind Mario
(Nick Paumgarten, The New Yorker, Dec. 13, 2010)
Time to read: 37 minutes (9366 words)
Jamin Brophy-Warren, who publishes a video-game arts and culture magazine called Kill Screen, told me that there is something in the amplitude and dynamic of Mario's jumps—just enough supernatural lift yet also just enough gravitational resistance—that makes the act of performing that jump, over and over, deeply satisfying. He also cited the archetypal quality of Mario's task, that vague feeling of longing and disappointment which undergirds his desperate and recurring quest for the girl. "It's a story of desire," Brophy-Warren said.

Twitter Was Act One
(David Kirkpatrick, Vanity Fair, March 3, 2011)
Time to read: 18 minutes (4,543 words)
"The Facebook Effect" author David Kirkpatrick on another Silicon Valley superstar—Twitter and Square founder Jack Dorsey. In submitting to his first in-depth profile, we learn about the events the led to him stepping down as CEO [since then he has returned to Twitter as CEO], his long-term goal (to become mayor of New York City), and his earliest career experiences.

Cranking
(Merlin Mann, 43 Folders, April 22, 2011)
Time to read: 12 minutes (3,068 words)
A disappearing dad with a looming book deadline examines his priorities, and promises changes.

The Thinking Mechanism is a series of weekly posts, published on Fridays, covering the ideas The Mechanism is thinking and talking about with our peers and clients.

• After more than 3 years of development, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) HTML Working Group has voted to move the HTML5 draft specification to Last Call status.

• Ad Age looks at the demographics of social media.

• This week Facebook began allowing brand tagging on photographs shared on the site. This reminds us of IKEA's Showroom campaign implemented in 2009 (see a case study video here.) Think about what they'll be able to create next using this new functionality.

• However that's not the most significant Facebook news of the week. After four and half years Facebook has been granted a patent on image tagging.

• LinkedIn's very successful IPO, launched Thursday, is seen by many as a watershed moment for Social Media.

• Another must see Google Labs Chrome Experiment Film: Rome's 3 Dreams of Black.

• WordPress.com has dropped support for IE6.

• Macworld has a great collection of articles taking a close look at the 10th anniversary of Apple's first retail stores.

• Put the ritalin down: In Praise of Shortened Attention Spans.

The Thinking Mechanism is a series of weekly posts, published on Fridays, covering the ideas The Mechanism is thinking and talking about with our peers and clients.

• We are very curious about Google's introduction of the Chromebook (with their typically great animated demo video.) We've known that a laptop that runs on Chrome and executes everything within the browser was in the works. What's more peculiar is the introduction of laptop rental services for business and education. With Adobe also introducing a subscription service for their Creative Suite 5.5, is leasing the future of hardware and software? Most likely it is a way to ensure that cash-strapped college students can afford the hardware and software to begin forging a brand bond as early as possible.

• And speaking of college students, a new study finds they are addicted to media.

•  On the same week that it releases a Best Practices Guide for Marketing on Facebook, the company is in PR hot water. Facebook paid a PR firm to smear Google. Leaked emails reveal Burson-Marsteller attempted to get USA Today and other titles to write criticizing Google's privacy policies. This from the company that is constantly telling us what we should think privacy is.

• We loved this week's Google Doodle, created by Ryan J. Woodward, paying tribute to Martha Graham. The Martha Graham Center of Contemporary Dance has annotated the works behind the doodle and knowing that many people would be searching for more information has cleverly incorporated fundraising campaigns to the page.

The Thinking Mechanism is a series of weekly posts, published on Fridays, covering the ideas The Mechanism is thinking and talking about with our peers and clients.

The week in quick links:

• How the Bin Laden announcement leaked out. - The news broke on Twitter but last Monday everyone in New York was buying newspapers.

• Sunday night saw the highest sustained rate of Tweets ever. From 10:45 - 2:20am ET, there was an average of 3,000 Tweets per second.

• Situation Room photo shows Flickr is grown up.

• The 7 stages of News in a Twitter and Facebook era.

• Google's latest commercial for Chrome is charming and sweet, until you realize how much information about us they already have.

• The Daily Loses $10M During First Quarter. - Pioneering technology is nothing if the content is not good.

• Push Pop Press launched Our Choice, an interactive book by Al Gore, redefining the ebook(app). Software developer Mike Matas demoed the app(ebook) at this year's TED. Benjamin Jackson reviewed it. - Pioneering technology paired with good content.

• Social Media accounts are Intellectual Property.

• Fortune builds app for the browser instead of building an iPad app.

• Another look at Saul Bass, this time logo design then and now. - The average life span of a Saul Bass logo is 34 years.

The Thinking Mechanism is a series of weekly posts, published on Fridays, covering the ideas The Mechanism is thinking and talking about with our peers and clients.

• Let's get it out of the way, today was The Royal Wedding. Some of us care, some of us don't care and our London office had to suffer through a bank holiday because of it. It broke streaming records, beating the World Cup. Most significantly, it was a catalyst for a real juxtaposition of the past and the future. I witnessed many people on a train platform waiting to get into New York watching the ceremony on iPads. An event happening thousand of miles away, in very old buildings, was casually watched in real time by people simply waiting to go about their days. We live in the future.

• Those iPads used to watch the wedding, they know where you are. This week Apple responded to an iPhone location-tracking controversy. On their ten part response and on interviews they strongly reiterated "Apple is not tracking the location of your iPhone. Apple has never done so and has no plans to ever do so." They admit there are bugs they have promised to fix in a near future update to iOS. But let's not forget, all mobile devices always know where you are relative to GPS, Wi-Fi and cell towers to provide you with quick service when location-tracking is relevant to your use of the device. Without that constant location-tracking, the use of Maps, Foursquare, Groupon, all the apps that take advantage of your location, would take minutes to launch.

• Issues of privacy and information sharing have to remain in the forefront of conversation as mobile use continues to grow. As of this week, thanks in large part to the millions of iOS devices purchased in the last year, Apple is more profitable than Microsoft.

• Lastly a non-tech thing we are loving this week: a close look at the classic work of Saul Bass for the movie Vertigo. "When Bass worked for film studios he offered them a package: main and credit titles, a symbol or trademark, a screen trailer, posters (half sheets, one sheet, three sheet, six sheet, twenty-four sheet), an insert, lobby cards, a window card, trade ads (six different versions, three colors) and magazine ads (at least 10 different versions). The Vertigo movie poster that’s become a landmark in graphic design and cinema history is the one sheet poster. Bass also designed other posters, each with a slightly different design, to match the proportions of the sheet they were printed on. Below you’ll find the half sheets and three sheet poster. I haven’t been able to locate quality images of the six sheet poster (which features the same handmade lettering as the Vertigo trailer ) or the twenty-four sheet poster."

The Thinking Mechanism is a series of weekly posts, published on Fridays, covering the ideas The Mechanism is thinking and talking about with our peers and clients.

• Whenever I hear anyone talking about cloud computing I think the cloud is were turbulent weather happens. This became obvious yesterday when an outage of Amazon Web Services brought down many websites and services for most of the day, disrupting social media and your check-ins.

• Is the Amazon outage Skynet's first attack?

• iPads are more widely used than Linux.

• An internal review of a project led to a debate on how many characters can the longest possible email address have. Try to guess before you read the answer.

• The web goes green for Earth Day.

• And lastly, colorful, eye-popping photos of Easter eggs splattering.

The Thinking Mechanism is a series of weekly posts, published on Fridays, covering the ideas The Mechanism is thinking and talking about with our peers and clients.

• Steve Jobs has approved an official biography, written by Walter Isaacson, an ex-executive from Time who has written biographies about Ben Franklin and Einstein. It’s been rumored that Isaacson has been working on the book since 2009. The book, titled “iSteve: The Book of Jobs" will be out in early 2012. This adds fuel to the speculation that Jobs health is not improving. Also, why a book? Why not release it as an app with additional audio and video content? Steve Jobs biography, there's an app for that?

• This week Adobe announced an update to the Creative Suite family of products, from CS5 to CS5.5. No major changes to Photoshop, Illustrator or Fireworks. The whole upgrade is obviously about adding HTML5 functionality to the suite to facilitate the creation of content for smartphones and tablets, a direct response to Apple's refusal to include Flash on iPhones and iPads. I think most significant is the introduction of a subscription program for the applications, for example you can subscribe to Photoshop for $35 a month, perhaps a way to curtail the large volume of pirated versions of CS because of its perceived high-price.

• While no one was really wowed by the CS update announcement everyone was impressed with the Photoshop on an iPad demo. The way layers are handled is amazing. As if that wasn't enough Adobe is working on three Photoshop-complementary iPad apps, Eazel, Nav and Lava, that link to Photoshop on a PC or a Mac and greatly enhance functionality. Eazel let's you paint on the iPad, Nav tranfers navigation elements to the iPad and Lava is an intuitive color mixer. The three apps use Adobe’s new Photoshop Touch SDK. This software development kit lets anyone write iPad apps that interact with Photoshop. This is what happens when Adobe and Apple aren't fighting about Flash.

• Hard to believe it is still around, but yes, Quark announced QuarkXPress 9.

The Thinking Mechanism is a series of weekly posts, published on Fridays, covering the ideas The Mechanism is thinking and talking about with our peers and clients.

• We've been spending a lot of time talking about LinkedIn and it's place in the social media universe. This week they made public a platform that should bring LinkedIn content, buttons, Twitter-esque "profile summaries" and more to websites throughout the Web.

• Yesterday Facebook launched the Open Compute Project, making public the specifications and design documents that went into creating their customized servers and datacenters. Ars Technica explains why they did it.

• Will Google's +1 beat Facebook's Like?

• And speaking of Google, Larry Page wasted no time as returning CEO, implementing a major reorganization of the company.

• All this talk of social media reminds us of a report from last summer. Neuroeconomist Paul Zak has discovered that social networking triggers the release of the generosity-trust chemical in our brains. In other words, using the LinkedIn, Like and +1 buttons affects the brain like falling in love.

The Thinking Mechanism is a series of weekly posts, published on Fridays, covering the ideas The Mechanism is thinking and talking about with our peers and clients.

• Apple's Worldwide Developer's Conference sold out in less than 10 hours. Two years ago it sold out in 30 days. Last year in little over a week. This year the focus is exclusively software, everything about the upcoming Mac OS X Lion update and the future of iOS. Xcode, the collection of tools needed to develop for both platforms, is easily available to anyone interested, you no longer have to sign up to the developer's program in order to acquire it, you can purchase it from the App Store for $4.99. Easier access to the tools means more interesting and cool apps in our future.

• It's time for a Browser Benchmark Battle: Chrome 10 vs. IE9 vs. Firefox 4. Beyond benchmarks, why do you use the browser you use?

• Color, the well-funded app of the moment, has gone from heavily hyped to experiencing backlash with amazing speed. Billed as an impromptu location and photo based social network, it sounded like an interesting concept full of potential, but instead the concept is poorly implemented with bad UI. This fantastic review paints the whole picture.

• Twitter succumbed to user pressure and removed the Quickbar from it's iPhone application. We suspect the return of Jack Dorsey to the company he founded had something to do with the removal. Intended to display trending topics, the Quickbar really was a disruptive eyesore that often displayed topics of little interest to the user. Too much Bieber, Kutcher, Gaga and not enough of the things and topics that the people we actually follow were discussing. Although the Quickbar may have had the side effect of introducing most of the world to, according to reports, the most influential person on twitter: Brazilian @RafinhaBastos.

• Today we've been asking ourselves, what the hell happened to Skype?

• Did you know the word gullible is not in Wikipedia?