According to Deadline ... The founders of Facebook aren't the only game-changing geeks poised to have their story told on a movie screen. Michael London's Groundswell Productions has teamed with producer John Morris to acquire movie rights to the Ken Auletta book Googled: The End of the World As We Know it .

Eric Schmidt talked to the Wall Street Journal : "I don't believe society understands what happens when everything is available, knowable and recorded by everyone all the time," he says. He predicts, apparently seriously, that every young person one day will be entitled automatically to change his or her name on reaching adulthood in order to disown youthful hijinks stored on their friends' social media sites.

Spiegel reports that German photographer and IT consultant Jens Best wants to personally take snapshots of all those )German( buildings which people asked Google Street View to remove. He then wants to add those photos to Picasa, including GPS coordinates, and in turn re-connect them with Google Maps. Jens believes that for the internet "we must apply the same rules as we do in the real world. Our right to take panoramic snapshots, for instance,

Do these things have a name, and what do they typically do? Gmail is chronically bad at filtering them out )or perhaps they do filter out many but there's just too much of them(. They usually come with an image attached, and as you can see in this case, a SWF attachment. [By Philipp Lenssen | Origin: Virus Game Attachments,

Looking for free sounds for a project of yours... say, atmospheric background noises, or a dog barking, or laughter, piano music, a squeaking door, or anything else? FreeSounds.org is a great collection of Creative Commons licensed WAVs, MP3, AIFF files and more. You can enter a whole lot of things into their search engine and get back a whole lot of great samples. You can hear a preview for every sound, and for downloading a quick registration will do.

Pingdom writes : Google is talking about fighting piracy, but perhaps the first thing they should focus on is actually making it possible for users to buy apps. All users. Sounds rather logical, doesn't it? So what are we talking about? The problem lies with Android Market. You can only pay for apps in 13 out of the 46 or so countries where Android phones are available. For those of you who like stats, 13 in 46 works out to less than 30%.

Wordstream created a visual overview of what they call the "Google graveyard" , that is, failed products. On the list are Google X, Google Catalog, Google Buzz and many more. )Nitpick: they call Google Answers the "answer to Yahoo Answers", though actually, Google Answers was made years before Yahoo Answers.( Then again, if you learn something from a cancelled product, perhaps in the end it won't have been a failure. Also see the lost features of Google ,

Paul Graham tells what went wrong, from his perspective, with Yahoo . "When I went to work for Yahoo after they bought our startup in 1998, it felt like the center of the world. It was supposed to be the next big thing. It was supposed to be what Google turned out to be ... What went wrong?" According to Paul, "Yahoo had two problems Google didn't: easy money, and ambivalence about being a technology company." [Via Andy .

NetworkWorld collected a couple of interesting quotes by Google boss Eric Schmidt on the subject of privacy and anonymity. He states that privacy is important, but shares some doubts over whether complete anonymity should/ will be granted in the future. Bruce Schneier on the other hand argues: Here's the problem: The very companies whose CEOs eulogize privacy make their money by controlling vast amounts of their users' information. Whether through targeted advertising,

I like the iPad as a casual device in general, but I love it as a two-player gaming device. Think of a board game where the pieces are magically moving... a game you can take to the cafe, to bars, play in the bus, on the train, whereever! With that in mind I created Ogs, which uses the great PhoneGap framework, allowing me to do it all in HTML/ JavaScript/ CSS. Please check out the video, and the game is now in the App Store .

Company-internal disagreements are natural and likely healthy but I think it's interesting what they are about - from the Wall Street Journal : By late 2008, Google executives were preparing to launch ads targeted at users' interests. But the specifics still remained controversial. Tensions erupted during a meeting with about a dozen executives at Google's Mountain View, Calif., headquarters about 18 months ago when Messrs.

Google and Verizon released a proposal relating to net neutrality . They claim their efforts are for an open internet: "[T]here should be a new, enforceable prohibition against discriminatory practices ... Importantly, this new nondiscrimination principle includes a presumption against prioritization of Internet traffic - including paid prioritization. So, in addition to not blocking or degrading of Internet content and applications,

ABC News writes : South Korean police said they raided Google Inc's Seoul office on Tuesday on suspicion that the Internet search leader had illegally collected data on users. Google has been preparing since late last year to launch its "Street View" service in South Korea and the data collection was related to the launch, police said. [Thanks TomHTML !

German publication Wirtschaftswoche )"Economy Week"( says that German manufacturer Microdrones has delivered a cam-equipped flying mini drone to Google. Microdrones boss Mr. Juerss is quoted as saying "We have good chances for a long term business relationship with Google" )is he just overly optimistic? Google wasn't available for comment to the magazine(.

Google's director of research Peter Norvig was interviewed by Slate : Google has been remarkably successful at creating popular products. How does the company create a culture that's conducive to generating new ideas? Well, we have great people, and that's a huge part of it. But I think the main thing is just trying a lot of ideas. We've built the ultimate system for making demos internally. If a startup company has an idea, it's like, "Well,

Google will kill off Google Wave, they told in a blog post . It was a technically very inspiring web app which, however, arrived without any particular and clear use case. This caused not only interface usability problems )Wave was good at allowing you to do a lot of things at once, but it often wasn't really good at anything in particular, e.g. plain chat when needed(. It also caused social frictions as people were using the tool with different, colliding expectations .

Perhaps bad news for the traffic of dictionary sites, which often don't show the actual word definition in the search engine snippets: Google now has a onebox of their own immediately offering the definition)s( for certain words you're searching for. Try enter e.g. pleasant into Google.com and the top will read: "pleas·ant/ÈplezYnt/Adjective ... 1. Giving a sense of happy satisfaction or enjoyment. ... 2. )of a person or their manner( Friendly and considerate; likable.

Google has released a tool which lets you preview and live-edit fonts which are part of the Google Font API. It's called Google Font Previewer and features fonts like Vollkorn, Lobster, Cardo and Reanie Beanie. Once you're done tweaking a font, you can copy the HTML snippet Google shows into your own page. [By Philipp Lenssen | Origin: Google Font Previewer | Comments ] [Advertisement] Want to make money with your website? AllPosters.

Early last year after reading a book about Lucasfilm, I wanted much more information on my beloved games like Maniac Mansion, Secret of Monkey Island or Loom. I ended up browsing Wikipedia for info on these titles, and that in turn gave me the idea of turning the Wikipedia articles into a book of its own. I've started the project with Google Docs but after hitting the usual limits, went to offline HTML editing and setting up several tools to get the formatting right,

Google has revamped its image search . Instead of showing image information right below individual images in the results overview, you'll now get just the image thumbnail. Hover over it, and the thumbnail will grow a bit in size and show its information text below it, like file name, originating site, and contextual keywords )you can also click on "Similar" for some pics to find similar imagery(. Thumbs are presented border-less, and rather close to each other.