Biggest 2013

• Biggest Surprise: Shutdown of Google Reader. The annotation being that how can we trust 'the cloud' in preserving user contents. Google also killed its own RSS reader extension for the Chrome browser. With power of Google, not only it can afford to discontinue a popular product (of its own), but also it can kill a widely use protocol.
• Biggest Collapse: Zheng Yunjie, a long time 'independent voice of China', published 'pre-written soft advertisement' disguised as his own opinion.
• Biggest Hoax: Chinese People Asks Government to Lower Housing Price. On the contrary, Chinese people are happy with the high housing price. With a average income one tenth of the US, China's housing price is ten times of the US per square feet. However, 1) the house ownership in China is close to 90%, while the figure in the US is less than 70%; 2) In China, most property owners have already paid off all mortgage. It is estimated that there are over 10 million empty houses in China while many newly developed communities dubbed as 'ghost town'. The driven force for ever rising housing price is investment. It will be easy to fix to bring the housing price to its true value: property tax. But neither the government nor the people wants that, especially the people. As a matter of fact, few Chinese would need to buy a house in a foreseeable future. At this time, many families have more than 1 house. With the Family Planning policy in place, each young family will inherit two houses from each's parents, so on so forth. A high housing price make everything wealthier, so why not?