Every April 1st, Google tries to outdo itself with a new array of April Fools' Day pranks, and this year was no different.

Users of Google quickly spotted a “Google Nose” link that appeared on April 1st that invited consumers to smell what they are seeing on the site, whether it is a campfire or a flower. Or, at least, it would let them “leverage new and existing technologies to offer the sharpest olfactory experience available.”Continue reading...

Today is 11.11.11, a day in which filmmakers and inspired citizens are documenting the entire 24-hour period for the global project, "One Day On Earth." The mission is to answer the question: Who are we? It’s an invitation of heightened value as cameras of every kind explore and record the known corners of a world now shared by seven billion inhabitants.

It was 1999 when the world population reached an estimated six billion. Estimates are it will take 14 years to reach eight billion and another 18 years to reach nine billion, sometime between 2045 and 2050.

The first "One Day On Earth" media event occurred on 10.10.10, an unprecedented venture in simultaneous global filming with every country in the world participating, resulting in a geo-tagged video archive of 3,000 hours of footage from 7,000 amateurs and professionals, to be released as a documentary this year.Continue reading...

Diaspora, the open-source social network that describes itself as “privacy-aware, personally-controlled,” has announced a September 15th launch.
Diaspora is being designed and built by a gang of four New York University students specializing in computer science and math: Daniel Grippi, Maxwell Salzberg, Raphael Sofaer, and Ilya Zhitomirskiy. Their project began in earnest with $200,000 raised on Kickstarter from 6,500 donators. One of the donors? Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg.

The Diaspora team saw their opportunity when Facebook was taking heavy fire for being too complicated, and clueless on user privacy concerns. “We want to put users back in control of what they share,” said co-founder Salzberg.

It’s conceived as an open source, do-it-all social network to aggregate information from Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Skype, and Tumblr – but with users’ full control over its dissemination.

Diaspora seeks to bridge the gap between the LinkedIn professional model and purely social posting, with its risk of TMI. The service provides intuitive ways for users to choose what content goes to their drinking buddies and what goes to their professional peers. “We know that’s a hard [user interface] problem and we take it seriously,” Salzburg says.

The biggest stumbling block is the apparent lack of marketplace demand for an open-source version of Facebook. Ringside Networks, founded by JBoss alumni, is one example of ‘build it and they may not come.’ Their social application server never got market traction.
Additionally, most consumers don’t want to run personal social networks, and for those who do – there’s Buddypress and Ning and extensions like Drupal.

Diaspora’s successful use of unconventional financing and their anti-Facebook stance garnered enough attention to force Facebook’s hand in listening to users’ criticism and fears and instituting some changes. Will Diaspora ultimately be a footnote to Facebook’s history (FB currently serves 500 million users and is worth $33 billion), or carve out a significant niche for itself?  For now, these four upstart students’ aspiration to provide an open-source option to Facebook remains…well, aspirational. Check back after September 15th.

July 1st update.

Capitol Records sues video-hosting site Vimeo over "lip-dubs." [Econsultancy]

Android carrier's affordable monthly rates could kill the iPhone. [DailyFinance]

Aol. touts its journalism credentials with Seed.com. [Business Insider]

Eight O'Clock Coffee offers a tutorial on Facebook. [BrandFreak]

Armani Exchange to launch new visual identity. [Brand New]

What a difference a decade makes. Just ten years ago, brands were given huge headaches by cyber-squatters: users who had beat them to registering their brand-name Internet URLs and were misrepresenting the brand.

No such problems today. Now, brands are given huge headaches by cyber-squatters, users who had beat them to registering their brand-name Twitter accounts and are misrepresenting the brand. Continue reading...