Hasta La Gadget!

When Google comes to your door – or your digital door – and tells you they’d like you to join their collective, generally you say yes, let’s do it! That’s what Behavio has announced they’ve done this week. Behavio is a company that was Knight Foundation funded and aimed to develop apps that would accurately detect social and behavioral trends of you, your friends, and everyone around you.

While it’s not entirely clear where the funding bits Behavio has received thus far will be funneled, we do know that the team remains highly thankful to both the Knight Foundation and SXSW Accelerator. This group won the 2012 SXSW Accelerator competition and gained additional publicity because of it. The video below, found by TechCrunch, shows a speech made by Behavio’s Nadav Aharony for the Knight Foundation as they presented for the 2012 Knight News Challenge.

According to the Knight Foundation, the folks at Behavio had already begun bringing the heat back over a half a year ago – and they certainly didn’t start there.

“Behavio is an open-source platform that turns phones into smart sensors of people’s real world behavior – from how they use their phones to how they communicate with others. Funding will be used to help programmers build apps with smarter sensors, create tools for journalists that uncover trends in community data and launch a mobile application that allows individuals to explore data about their lives.”

The Behavio Team has been clear in their announcement of their integration with Google that they’re going to continue to maintain their Funf open source project as they work their way into the heart of the Google complex. As they aimed to make “smartphone apps [that] are actually smart”, so too did they call upon their Funf buddies to do the same – Open Sensing Framework is what it was and is all about at Funf.

“We are very excited to announce that the Behavio team is now a part of Google! At Behavio, we have always been passionate about helping people better understand the world around them. We believe that our digital experiences should be better connected with the way we experience the world, and we couldn’t be happier to be able to continue building out our vision within Google.” – The Behavio Team

Above you’ll see the beginning of a touching letter posted today by the Behavio Team announcing their jumping in with Google. What we’re to understand is that Google will, as always, be using the team to create wonderful new projects as they continue to strengthen those they’re already pushing solidly.

We can’t wait to see what the developers and forward-thinking minds at Behavio will bring to the Googleplex! Nadav Aharony, Alan Gardner, and Cody Sumter are names you’re going to hear again in the future – keep them in mind!

Google acquires Behavio: social prediction connects with the big G is written by Chris Burns & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

Well OK! If you go to music.twitter.com, you’ll see the above image, a clear sign that Twitter is getting into the music business. How? That remains to be officially seen, but it looks like the House of Birds will come …

Social networks are a great place to vent your frustrations to your “friends,” but sometimes they can be a hotbed for debates and arguments. According to a new survey that polled almost 2,700 people, approximately 20% people have reduced in-person contact with someone due to an argument or debate that occurred online.

The survey was conducted by Kerry Patterson et al, who wrote the New York Times best-seller book Crucial Conversations. The study says 78% of social network users reported being hostile in some fashion while online. Furthermore, the survey pointed out that 40% of users have admitted to unsubscribing or “unfriending” someone over an argument on a social networking site.

Other findings from the survey include 76% of users reported to have witnessed an argument on a social networking site, while 19% have gone so far as to decrease in-person contact with someone because of something they said online. A whopping 88% of users believe people are less polite on social media than in person, and 81% say that arguments they have been involved with over social media remain unresolved.

Of course, this isn’t surprising at all. The internet is a hotbed for incivility, and since the consequences are so low, many users have no qualms to start an argument or be rude to other users, which is why cyber bullying has been such a hot topic lately. Social networks provide the opportunity to make connections, but it turns out that it’s having the opposite effect on a majority of users.

[via VitalSmarts]

Image via XKCD

Hostility on social networks rises to 78% of users is written by Craig Lloyd & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

I guess you can say that most twins who grow up together tend to be inseparable, but there are times in life when identical twins had to be separated at birth due to circumstances, and Samantha Futerman and Anais Bordier are just such a pair. Separated at birth. Futerman is currently an actress who lives in Los Angeles, while Bordier is a French fashion design student who resides in the capital of the Old World, London. It took the serendipity of one of Bordier’s friends to discover a YouTube video of Futerman, and she then mentioned their extremely close physical resemblance to her doppleganger, who was contacted over on Facebook.

One thing led to another, and it was eventually realized that both of the girls share the same birthday, and were placed in foster care before being adopted by different families. Futerman shared the experience of her early contact with Bordier, saying,”I knew I was about to embark on a journey that no one else had ventured before. Through just a Facebook induced interaction, I was positive that this girl was in fact my biological twin sister.” The light side of Facebook is shared once again, and we like heartwarming stories like these.

By Ubergizmo. Related articles: The ZenDock Is An Elegant Way To Manage Your MacBook’s Cables, Google Links Google+ Pages To YouTube Accounts,

When the competition goes highbrow, what’s the CEO of a competing
airline to do? Well, if you’re Richard Branson you might seek out
advertising space that goes below the belt. That’s right. . . while
politicians, the likes of U.S. Representative Anthony Weiner have lost
their jobs over public images pertaining to to their ‘junk,’ Virgin Atlantic’s
number one publicity junkie exposes himself to the world at large – and
to boot – getting off "Scot" free (literally)!