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It would be nice if time just marched along in an orderly fashion, one second after another, each of equal length, 31,556,926 times per year, but that's not the way the world works. Years are actually a bit shorter than we pretend they are, so we invented little tricks - algorithms, if you will - to compensate. The Gregorian calendar adds an extra day to its shortest month every four years to adjust for the discrepancy. My native tribe, however, also uses a lunisolar calendar, which we fix by adding a whole extra month seven times every 19 years.

Simple enough, right? Well, actually, the Earth is still too wobbly for these simple equations, so we lose and gain a few milliseconds here and there. Atomic clocks occasionally have to use a leap second to keep things lined up with astronomical time. Doesn't matter much to us, right? But imagine you're not just trying to keep your appointments straight. Imagine you're trying to keep all of Google's computers from crashing. Then what do you do?

Time magazine's editors have named Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg their Person of the Year, despite WikiLeaks leader Julian Assange crushing the popular vote. Zuckerberg received the 10th highest number of votes from readers. We wrote early this week about the possibility that Time's editors might choose someone other than the person their readers chose.

So what does Zuckerberg have to say about the man who peeled back the curtain from the internal discussions among diplomats for history's most formidable empire? Not much. Time's press release included a rambling pseudo-statement from Zuckerberg on WikiLeaks. Read it below and ask yourself: shouldn't he have put a little more thought into such an important matter than this? Wasn't there anyone available to edit these statements for coherence?

Despite the fact that Wikileaks front man Julian Assange won TIME's reader poll for the magazine's Person of the Year 2010 feature, the editors ultimately picked Facebook CEO Mark Zuckberberg as the overall winner.

Zuckberberg was chosen "for connecting more than half a billion people and mapping the social relations among them ... and for changing how we all live our lives."

But was Assange robbed?

This is the third entry in our exploratory series "Will One Company Dominate the Cloud". Today we're blinking twice after reviewing the innovation engine at Amazon.

The Amazon AWS product is all about services. While others are marketing the cloud with an explanation point, the cloud leader is focused on the raw building blocks. This includes everything from storage to people. Amazon is learning how to find new ways to optimize connections and monetize them in increments of time.

For many of us, our tributaries of social data find their way into our lifestream, an aggregated collection of our online activities. More often than not, that stream appears as a collection of text entries: the most recent item followed by the second most recent, and so on. While the progression is obvious, what's not so clear is the passage of time. Those data points could be seconds apart - or months apart. Enter Dipity, a service that takes those moments in time and plots them along along a timeline, providing an entirely new take on the activities we're pursuing and how they relate.