links for 2011-01-13

The best I can come up with is that speaking about gold is like one of those good news bad news jokes, you know the ones – your doctor phoned with some good news and some bad news. The good news is they will be naming a new incurable disease after you.

The good news is that gold is rising in value; the bad news is – well nearly everything else about the economy.

Silicon Valley’s Sun Microsystems, Cisco, Hewlett-Packard, Yahoo, Google and Facebook are some of the largest technology companies in the world. Stanford alumni founded the first five. But if things had turned out a bit differently in the fall of 1999, would we have been able to attribute the creation of Facebook to Stanford as well?

It was in 1999 that three Stanford seniors, Tuyen Truong ’00, Lawrence Gentilello ’00 and Aaron Bell ’00 founded their start-up Steamtunnels.net, a social networking website that paired information from the 1999 version of Stanford Who, called WhoIs, with the photos in Stanford’s printed Facebook. Steamtunnels is seen by some as a separate but early form of the Facebook that exists today.