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?

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.

• Last week at SXSWi Stephen Coles, Frank Chimero, Tiffany Wardle and Jason Santa Maria presented the "Cure for the Common Font" panel, a web designer's introduction to typeface selection. They have now made the slides, audio and comprehensive list of resources available online. Good typography is not just for print anymore.

• From The New York Times comes "today’s quiz: What company derives 96 percent of its revenue from advertising, has a video platform that is currently negotiating with the National Basketball Association, a movie studio and various celebrities, and is developing a subscription service that would be plug-and-play for publishers and consumers the world over. Time Warner? News Corporation? Viacom? Nope. Google."  Whether they want to admit it or not, Google is turning into a very large media company, especially as they continue to lose ground to Facebook.

• And speaking of the grey lady, as they prepare to roll out their paywall there has been much discussion about how poorly implemented it is, how incomprehensibly expensive it is, and lastly, how this $40-50M investment, years in the making, has already been thwarted by 4 lines of code. We can't help but wonder, what needs to happen for newspapers to learn that the key to successful paid digital transactions is simplicity?

• We all have our digital alliances, the computers, devices and app ecosystems we prefer, but part of progressive digital thinking requires stepping out of our comfort zones to explore everything available. We are paying very close, platform-agnostic, attention to tablets, from the ridiculous to the sublime. Via Business Week we learn "Google says it will delay the distribution of its newest Android source code, dubbed Honeycomb, at least for the foreseeable future. The search giant says the software, which is tailored specifically for tablet computers that compete against Apple's iPad, is not yet ready to be altered by outside programmers and customized for other devices, such as phones." This is disappointing and very surprising. We like our iPads but we like competitive innovation more.

• And speaking of progressive digital thinking, 14 year old self-proclaimed web designer, developer and geek J-P Teti demonstrates incredible insight explaining why, coupled with the above news, 2011 will be the year of the iPad. Seriously, go read his post. Smart.

•  The heart of all things digital is the browser, even in an ever growing app world. (Go ahead, try working for an hour without touching a browser.) The past couple of weeks have brought us some very relevant browser updates. Firefox 4 was released. On the same day Chrome 11 Beta was also released with some interesting features, including use of the HTML5 speech input API, which allows you to talk to your computer and Chrome interprets it. Microsoft  released IE9 while still encouraging us to get rid of IE6 (and good riddance.) And WebKit (the engine behind Safari) continues to make their nightly builds available. Let's hope all these releases are a sign of everyone moving towards universal standards compliance.

• And now for something a little more analog. What can you do with all those things that technology is rendering obsolete? Make amazing art of course. Next time you have some money to spare, consider this.

Continuing our weekly posts, here are the things that got us talking this week:

• MIT's Media Lab is home to some fantastic mad scientists. Their latest project to go live is the Junkyard Jumbotron, which let's you take any variety of devices that can display a browser and combine them to display one fully interactive image.

• Walking back to the office after a social media meeting with a client Dave uttered the highly retweetable quote "You don't choose social media, social media chooses you." My response, "don't wait until social media happens to you."

• The New York Times has erected the great wall of pay around their digital content, and while they wait and see how this decision affects their business model, we would like to point them to the March 17, HBR The Daily Stat newsletter, that includes the following nugget: "39% of people surveyed said they would feel no impact if their local newspapers shut down. 30% said it would have a minor impact, but only 28% said the impact would be major, according to the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism. About three-quarters of respondents to the survey of 2,251 U.S. adults said they wouldn't be willing to pay anything for online news if their newspapers failed to survive." The full Pew Research Center report, titled "How mobile devices are changing community information environments," is available here.

• This post would not be complete without a mention of the recently ended SXSW Interactive. It seems that beyond all the discussions of buzzy "branded journalism," adding "game layers" to everything and replacing ironic air quotes with ironic air hashtags, the main reason to attend this year was to be able to get a brand new iPad 2 on the day of release at Apple's SXSW pop-up store with a minimal amount of waiting in line. Dave said it best today, SXSW has become the Burning Man of interactive, growing too big, too fast, for its own good.