Strange New World: Tech Picks of the Week

March 13, 2009— -- This week, in this Strange New World of ours, we take time to recognize a few different milestones: Hulu's paper anniversary, the coming of USB 3.0 and Nintendo selling 1 million DS games.

Here now, our picks of the week:

With annual sales of roughly 2 billion devices, the Universal Service Bus, or USB, seems as ubiquitous as wall outlets. Now its backers are set to launch the latest version, 3.0, which aims to maintain its dominance by scaling up to deliver raw speeds of up to 5 gigabits per second.

Announced in November 2008, USB 3.0 added its latest product March 9: the industry's first PHY-controller package. It's noteworthy simply as an example of the growing amount of USB 3.0 hardware that vendors supply to one another in order to build products that can be sold to consumers and enterprises.

The first commercial USB 3.0 products -- such as external hard drives and digital cameras -- could debut in early 2010.

Some analysts predict 500 million USB 3.0 devices by 2012. The closer USB 3.0 inches toward its commercial debut, the more questions there are about which rivals it will displace, particularly eSATA and FireWire. But many of those technologies are also developing faster successors, such as FireWire 3200.

A year ago, a doubting public, yours truly included, wondered if a new video site with an odd name would survive for a month, and now Hulu is celebrating its one-year anniversary. And not only is it surviving, it is doing well!

The No. 2 video-on-demand site, behind YouTube, is not content to rest on its laurels on its paper anniversary.

Hulu is now expanding into the social-networking arena. All the details are not out yet, but there is now a "Friends" tab on your Hulu profile that lets you add your contacts from Gmail, Facebook, MySpace, Hotmail and other sites.

Once you do this you can browse their profile pages and see what they are watching in their Hulu profile.