Links for Friday April 30^th, 2010

• The Surprising Reason Why Americans Are So Lonely, and Why Future Prosperity Means Socializing with Your Neighbors: If you ignore the misleading title and the first several paragraphs, this is actually a pretty interesting article about the new "local food" movement, and some of the challenges in growing food close to where it is consumed.

• The real reason why Steve Jobs hates Flash: Pretty interesting stuff from Charlie Stross, on the future of computing. His strongest point:

  "I've got a theory, and it's this: Steve Jobs believes he's gambling Apple's future — the future of a corporation with a market cap well over US $200Bn — on an all-or-nothing push into a new market. HP have woken up and smelled the forest fire, two or three years late; Microsoft are mired in a tar pit, unable to grasp that the inferno heading towards them is going to burn down the entire ecosystem in which they exist."

  Definitely some food for thought. (via Daring Fireball)

• What you can learn from Panic's approach to email marketing: The Panic guys are just doing some ridiculously cool stuff. Using the slash ('/') character in order to emulate an airmail envelope? Just awesome.

• YouTube - Tokyo Electric Taxi Project launch: I like what Better Place is up to, and I'm glad to see their plans actually coming to fruition.