People Don’t Take Smoke Breaks Anymore, They Take Facebook Breaks / ALEX WILLIAMS

“People don’t take smoke breaks anymore — they take Facebook breaks.” Now, there’s a beauty that I heard this afternoon at the IBM Connect event here in Orlando.

You can blame it on the digital natives — the young ones who feed their activity streams to network and create their digital personas. For them, it’s not so unusual. It actually makes a lot of sense considering how data is changing who we are and what we represent.

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With The Help Of Citizen Cartographers, Google Launches More Detailed Map Of North Korea / DREW OLANOFF

"With its Map Maker tool, people from around the world can participate in making Google’s maps more detailed, accurate and up-to-date. This is exactly what happened for North Korea’s maps, Google announced today."

To build this map, a community of citizen cartographers came together in Google Map Maker to make their contributions such as adding road names and points of interest. This effort has been active in Map Maker for a few years and today the new map of North Korea is ready and now available on Google Maps. As a result, the world can access maps of North Korea that offer much more information and detail than before.

We know this map is not perfect — one of the exciting things about maps is that the world is a constantly changing place. We encourage people from around the world to continue helping us improve the quality of these maps for everyone with Google Map Maker. From this point forward, any further approved updates to the North Korean maps in Google Map Maker will also appear on Google Maps

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Get Ready For Even More Google Glasshole Sightings / RYAN LAWLER

Maybe you’ve seen these people around San Francisco or Mountain View, inevitably staring off into space while swiping the sides of their glasses during conversation, ignoring those around them while surfing the web or scrolling through images they’ve captured with the device. I like to call them “Glassholes.”

Sergey Brin spotted on subway wearing Google glasses

There’s also that whole thing about Google knowing everywhere you’ve been and everything you’ve looked at, but that’s a whole other discussion.
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Tumblr Blog “Actual Facebook Graph Searches” Goes Viral / SARAH PEREZ

Well, that didn’t take long. Facebook Graph Search is now its own Tumblr meme: “Actual Facebook Graph Searches.” The site dials up the social media rubbernecking-slash-privacy outrage to a whole new level: user submissions. It’s like that Gizmodo post was turned into an entire blog, edited by everyone. The blog is now blowing up on Hacker News. It’s getting tweeted. The site’s creator says traffic is ridiculous. But does it have a real message?

Perhaps.

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Google Announces First Project Glass Hackathons In NYC And SF, Will Detail ‘Mirror API’ / RIP EMPSON

Over the last year, Google has slowly been unveiling its plans around Project Glass, the company’s R&D program responsible for attempting to bring wearable computing to the mainstream. Complete with augmented reality and an integrated display, Google’s smart glasses have had many geeks on pins and needles, especially as “Explorer” editions of the glasses have been expected to begin showing up early this year.

Today, Google sent out its first invitations to the developers who signed up for the $1,500 special edition glasses, inviting them to an “early look at Glass” and “two full days of hacking on the upcoming Google Mirror API” in San Francisco and NYC. The invite also includes the first mention of the project’s APIs, which have gone unmentioned to this point.

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Twitter Now Lets You Know When You’ve Typed Something Clickable Or Went Over The Character Limit / DREW OLANOFF

When you start composing your tweet, the text will change colors when you’ve added something clickable, like a username or URL. The text changes to blue, and this is to let you know that you’ve done something “different.” It’s nice onboarding for new users, or when you’re quickly typing out your latest amazing thought.

Similarly, the text will change color if you’ve gone over 140 characters, in red, showing you exactly which ones have to go.

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How Facebook’s Graph Search Just Replaced A Major Chunk Of Google /

Facebook just took a big bite out of Google. Today, the social network announced Graph Search, a new feature that lets you search the interests, location, and preferences of your friends.

For anyone who uses the Internet to search restaurant recommendations, travel advice, books to read on vacation, or which political candidates to vote for, Facebook may have replaced Google as the best search engine. Birds of a feather flock together, and only Facebook can let you know about all the cool things your friends experience that’d you’d also like to know about.

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