social networking

Most DARPA challenges serve some sort of obvious military or intelligence purpose. But the agency has us scratching our heads over its latest competition, the Network Challenge: a $40,000 cash prize will go to the first person who finds the correct latitude and longitude of ten weather balloons located within the continental United States.

In what was no doubt the first ever 140-character legal document, the British High Court has served an anonymous web-pest an injunction via Twitter. This is the first time the microblogging service has been used to execute a court order.

Not long from now, in a galaxy that looks surprisingly similar to your garage, you might be the director and star of a scene from Star Wars. And thankfully, George Lucas isn't involved in any way.

The site Star Wars: Uncut has decided to crowd-source a remake of the film by chopping it up into 15-second increments. Using the social video site Vimeo, people can sign up to download one of 472 15-second chunks of Star Wars: A New Hope and re-film it however they choose. Once complete, all 472 Vimeo clips will be stitched together in sequence to re-create the entire film. The results are already rolling in, and they're awesome.

Look out, Ashton, there's a new Twitter sensation: the can. That's right, the toilet, the head, the commode. Shardy, a hacker over at Aculei has modded his toilet to tweet with every flush. And frankly, it's awesome.

You can follow the porcelain recliner's Twitter feed here, and I've got to admit, some of the tweets are kinda funny. Not "ha-ha" funny, but at least "bring a smile to the face" funny.

Emergency response entails a widespread tactical effort by countless government agencies. Too often, citizens are left out of the loop and have to rely on mass media, cell phones, and Web sites for emergency information. Microsoft Vine is a new social networking tool, designed to help its users keep tabs on people and places. Currently in a beta test in Seattle, the service lets you enter a location and see news reports aggregated from 20,000 sources, and from the United States National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. You can enter people you want to track into Microsoft Vine, and then receive an e-mail, text message, or an update about them in the Vine dashboard -- which runs on Windows only. Disaster victims with Macs are out of luck.

Good news for the 150-million-plus users of Facebook: Now you don’t have to lift a finger to follow your friends. The upcoming Palm Pre and the British-made INQ1 are the first in a new crop of phones designed for constant connection to the social-networking site.