This article from a Palo Alto writer is a fantastic and human perspective on Steve Jobs and his retirement. It's a good reminder that no matter what mark you leave on the world through your career, the work that you do as a parent is just as important.

It must feel good to be a part of Apple today: The company was proclaimed the world’s top smartphone vendor by Strategy Analytics, and its cash reserves are now bigger than the U.S. government’s balance.

Apple is now the world’s largest smartphone vendor by volume with 18 percent market share, according to Strategy Analytics‘ report. Nokia is now number three with 15%, behind Samsung, which grew an amazing 520% annually to grab a 17% share of the global smartphone market.

Also, with a $75.9 billion balance, Apple is obviously doing really well in the “cash reserves” department, but it sounds even better when you hear the U.S. Treasury Department say that the government now has a total operating balance of $73.8 billion.

Apple’s stock price recently surged passed $400, and its total market capitalization is more than $363 billion, which makes it the second largest company in the world, behind Exxon Mobil. The Cupertino giant is already on top of the world, and the only question right now seems to be: How much higher can it go?

So yeah, Apple's clearly doing WAY better than the feds. In the spirit of cooperative capitalism, I think Apple should bail out the government. Of course, Apple should get a huge share of ownership of the U.S. government, just as the government did when it bailed out gigantic, "too big to fail" organizations a couple years ago. It's only fair, really.

Apple clearly is better run than anything in Washington, so they might as well just declare Steve Jobs to be the CEO of the United States once they own the feds. After that, they can mandate Apple products for use in all branches of the federal government. Their already stellar sales will reach unimaginable levels! That can only mean good things for shareholders, consumers and Apple/US government.

Problem solved.

In what’s being called by baseball promoters “one of the most immersive social media events in Major League Baseball history,” Monday night’s Home Run Derby will feature many of the competition’s batters interacting with fans during the competition on Twitter for the first time ever.

This should be highly entertaining for baseball fans who tweet, to witness all the trash talk (trash tweets?) between the jovial all-stars who will be swinging for the fences. Get your questions and comments ready for your favorite player. Which Twitter accounts should you follow during this batting extravaganza? Here’s the full roster from MLB.com:

American League captain David Ortiz (@davidortiz), Jose Bautista (@JoeyBats19) and Kemp (@TheRealMattKemp) will be tweeting on their accounts during the course of the event as participants, and so will other All-Stars including Heath Bell (@HeathBell21), Gio Gonzalez (@GioGonzalez47), Hunter Pence (@HunterPence9), Brandon Phillips (@DatDudeBP), Gaby Sanchez (@GabySanchez15), Justin Upton (@RealJustinUpton), Major League Baseball’s first Tweeter C.J. Wilson (@str8edgeracer), Howie Kendrick (@HKendrick47) and Joel Hanrahan (@hanrahan4457).

Want to see these guys smacking it out of the park on TV? It’ll be live on Monday night (7/11/11) from Chase Field in Phoenix on ESPN and ESPN3 starting at 8 P.M. ET, or watch the live stream on MLB.com. Not into TV? Follow the players’ tweets all in one place on this Twitter list.

Whoa there, MLB! "One of the most immersive social media events in Major League Baseball History"? Kinda grand language for something which most people still don't really understand and which has existed for a only a tiny fraction of the time that baseball has been a part of this country's DNA.

Twitter and other social media channels are great and all (obviously I'ma big fan), but come on! Social media's few years of mainstream acceptance are just a blink compared to100+ years of baseball history. I'm sure today's tweeting from the Home Run Derby will be the most immersive event in MLB history, but let's be careful when juxtaposing social media and one of America's grandest sporting traditions.

Twitter will announce a photo-sharing service at the D9 conference in Rancho Palos Verdes, Calif., this week, according to sources familiar with the matter.

Twitter CEO Dick Costolo is set to speak at D9 on Wednesday.

I am indeed aware that D9 is the conference put on by this very site, but was not able to get sources to confirm the image-hosting announcement on the record. Twitter spokespeople did not reply for a request for comment on the matter.

Currently, Twitter users who wish to post photos in their tweets must host them elsewhere, with popular options including Twitpic, Yfrog, Instagram and Flickr. Users then include links to the photos within their tweets.

Many Twitter clients, including those developed by the company, use the links to go fetch the images and display them inline. But the process could certainly be smoother.

Companies like Twitpic and ImageShack, which operates Yfrog, bring in millions of dollars of revenue by selling advertising on the image pages that are distributed widely by those tweeted links. ImageShack has raised more than $10 million in funding from backers including Sequoia Capital, Index Ventures, and Felicis Ventures.

Twitter has previously moved onto turf on which third-party developers had already built Twitter-related businesses. The company has cited a desire to ensure a consistent and accessible user experience on various platforms.

Twitter explicitly told developers to stop making their own clients earlier this year. After that it bought the leading third-party client, TweetDeck.

The news was first reported today by TechCrunch’s Alexia Tsotsis.

This is one thing I've really been wanting for a while. Glad to see Twitter finally bringing photo hosting in-house. I'm really hoping videos can be hosted on their service as well.

What I'm hoping this brings about is a standardized way of displaying photos in tweets. I find it ridiculously annoying to keep track of which clients will natively post to certain sites and which will display photos inline, etc. With Twitter hosting photos, I hope that all clients will adopt inline display of photos hosted by Twitter.