For those interested, NIST (National Institue of Standards and Technoology) announced a competition to find candidates for the SHA-3 algorithm back in November 2007:
"NIST also plans to host a final SHA-3 Candidate Conference in the spring of 2012 to discuss the public feedback on these candidates, and select the SHA-3 winner later in 2012."
[http://csrc.nist.gov/groups/ST/hash/sha-3/Round3/index.html]
The final SHA-3 Candidate Conference was held March 22-23, so they should be picking the winner any day now.
Sometime soon I believe SHA-3 will be chosen and we'll all be able to move onto that.