I'm drinking coffee in the Au Bon Pain on 8th St near Broadway, but didn't check in on Foursquare cause I hear they might get bought by Facebook (heh that was a joke, I'm actually lazy). Hope they don't but I could understand why they might, cause the neck of the woods they reigned over is about to become the province of much bigger companies with far more users. 

Brief comment on all the people quitting Facebook over the changes in their privacy policies -- I'm not quitting. I understood that they could do this and didn't put any info on the site that I didn't consider public. I always saw it as a publishing platform. If anything it frustrated me that it wasn't all public from the start.  

The one company that I really care about is Dropbox, and I know almost nothing about them. I hope they don't sell out, what they have is too good for Google or Facebook. If I were a Twitter board member I'd seriously consider merging with them. It could really shake things up. On the other hand, the technology that Dropbox has mastered is so important that there should be an open source equivalent that we can all deploy, so we can have Dropboxes for sensitive info we don't want to share with them.  

I'm not really worried about Dropbox and patents, given that we had much of what they have in 2002 in Radio's upstreaming feature. They did a better job of implementing it, so hat's off to them. But there's plenty of prior art.  

I put this idea out there because we should be looking at this. And wouldn't it be grand if Dropbox, realizing they had a shot at creating something huge, threw some fat on the fire while they were ascendent and open sourced their implementation right now.