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Google’s been on a homepage logo changing spree: they’ve celebrated H.G. Wells, the bar code, Confucious, Gandhi, and Sesame Street over the last few months alone. If you check Google.com now though, you’ll see that the search giant is celebrating something different: the discovery of water on the moon! NASA made the stunning announcement earlier today after its moon bombing mission successfully revealed water under the lunar surface. And now the Google logo depicts the bombing revealing water.
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Each Friday we choose a Lunchtime Poll topic to get a sense of how Mashable readers feel about the chosen topic of the week. Below are the results from last Friday’s poll, where we asked your favorite Twitter photo-sharing service. Is your favorite service not represented — or not high enough! — in the list? Let us know in the comments! And to make sure your vote counts next time, be sure to check back tomorrow for the next edition of the Lunchtime Poll.
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It’s been more than a year since Bill Gates stepped down from day-to-day operations at Microsoft to focus on his philanthropic efforts through the Gates Foundation. In that time, Gates has traveled the world (in the past week alone, he’s been in China, India, and today, New York), strategizing the best use of his enormous fortune and that of his foundation, which, also includes $31 billion of Warren Buffett’s money.
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The types of marketing offers (we refer to them more descriptively as scams) that have plagued ecommerce sites like Intelius are now facing U.S. government scrutiny. These scams are kissing cousins to the Scamville social gaming offers that we’ve written about recently. Next week the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation will hold a full committee hearing on Aggressive Sales Tactics on the Internet and their Impact on American Consumers.
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A high-drama and high-stakes ScamVille exchange over the weekend left Zynga in the penalty box. Facebook put their newest social game, FishVille, on ice for advertising violations. In response, Zynga said they’d pull down all advertising offers until further notice. Zynga’s now saying that the game will be live again at midnight tonight. 875,000 users flocked to the aquarium game in its first two days, so I’m sure they’ll be glad to see it back. And so far Zynga has lived up to its recent promise.
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Google Wave debuted in a whirlwind of buzz and expectation, and yet few of us have managed to make it part of our workflow. What is Google Wave good for anyway? Those use cases are still emerging, it seems. Here’s an interesting one: Charlie Osmond at the FreshWorks blog points out that Twitter hashtags – adding the conference name as a hashtag on a tweet – aren’t an ideal solution to tracking a conference.
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I’d probably feel slightly smug, if I didn’t feel so sick. Smug that after two weeks of me suggesting that social media might not be an unequivocally Good Thing in terms of privacy and human decency, the news has delivered the perfect example to support my view. Unfortunately it’s hard to feel smug – hard to feel anything but sadness and nausea – when thirteen innocent people are dead. I’m talking, of course, about Thursday’s Fort Hood shootings.
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The ads are destroying YouTube. At least this one is. It is a video ad for sustainable energy company from Spain called Acciona. Yeah, I had never heard of them either. The video starts with this Euro-dude in a suit starting to blow up and crack apart like he’s made from plaster. Halfway through, the actual video player crack in half, and all of the surrounding parts of the site shake and fall away, while an annoying voiceover is saying something about rebirth. I don’t know, maybe it makes more sense in Spanish.
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Move over, Verizon Droid, there’s a new handset moonwalking into town. You may have to shield your eyes from the glare, because much like its namesake this phone is blindingly larger-than-life. Manufactured by one of the many Chinese imitation goods businesses referred to collectively as shanzai, this bling-bedecked mobile is encrusted with faux diamonds and comes with a most probably pirated Michael Jackson live performance DVD.
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It wasn’t all that long ago that Digg captured our collective imagination. In fact, even last year Google thought it was important enough to seriously consider buying Digg, only to back out at the last minute. Digg was the future of news. It was crowdsourced, democratic editorial. The masses decided what was news, not some 50 year old guy in a skyscraper in New York, who secretly hated the Internet. a lot of the shine has come off Digg.
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