Daily Tech and Gadget

Are you ready to let everyone know the expert you are? Start by answering questions on Twitter using Replyz , a new service built on top of the Twitter API . It looks for common question phrases and extracts those tweets to its site.

Windows/Mac/Linux (Adobe AIR): The marquee features added to social network aggregator TweetDeck are Google Buzz and Foursquare support, plus scheduled updates. What’s actually useful, though, are the global filters that weed out oversharing, spam, and other annoyances. More » TweetDeck – Google – Twitter – Adobe AIR – Google Buzz

Back in the way back when of 2006, a group of private investors got together and decided to purchase the Acclaim name. Resurrecting the company — the name’s built-in brand awareness was a major factor for the purchase — the new Acclaim Games aimed to grab its own slice of the casual gaming pie. Since then, it’s managed to accrue 15 million subscribers through its website , offering a plethora of free-to-play casual MMOs.

A great quote, the kind that changes your mood or frame of mind, can come for a famous figure or your friend holding a beer. Qwotebook, a web quotation sharing project, lets you compile quotes and see and favorite others’ quotatables. More » Quotation – Recreation – Food – Drink – Humor

It’s no secret that we’re big fans of free web service Mint, but now the account and budget managing tool has added a Q&A community, so free, expert financial advice is just a click away from your personal finance hub. More »

Facebook kicked off the f8 conference with a keynote that laid out its plans to integrate the web into Facebook and Facebook into the web. The social networking powerhouse began by re-affirming its commitment to the unified login provided by Facebook Connect, and revoked the previous limitation that required Facebook Connect-enabled websites to delete cached user data within 24 hours. From today forward, Facebook Connect websites can store user data to create a seamless browsing experience that is enhanced by a single, persistent login. Facebook then presented its expanded Open Graph concept, introduced a series of new social plugins for websites, and unveiled the  new Graph API, an improved and expanded core framework for developers

The countdown is over and the mystery is solved. Nokia just let us in on the secret of its ” everyone connect ” teaser: a trio of new middling handsets. Yes folks, hardware, but not the N-series flagship many of you were hoping for. Instead we’ve got a handful of affordable QWERTY cellphones bent on bringing messaging and social networking to the masses

Gaming Booyah has released version 3.0 of their MyTown location-based social networking app on the iPhone. As Keith Lee told me at GDC a few weeks ago, this app makes up the largest number of location-based social users on the platform, eclipsing even Foursquare and Gowalla in terms of users. And version 3.0 overhauls the social side of the game, allowing you to now visit friends’ towns, view their check-in history inside the app, and track them across leaderboards. You can also send items and gifts to your friends, which will likely make up a huge part of their in-game microtransaction system.

Cities, counties, states and other municipal entities don’t want to be left out of the Facebook rush. They’ve begun to create Facebook Pages for everything from their parks to their police departments to their city councils. Inside Facebook has covered governmental efforts on Facebook before , so this week we thought it’d be interesting to see how cities are using the social network to promote everybody’s favorite public service: public parks. One surprise was that many of the parks Pages we perused had recently started, something one official we spoke to said was the result of an industry trend towards social media.

Today in Denver CO, the 10 annual LIDAR Mapping Forum kicks off. Several hundred Geo tech professionals from around the Globe will take part in a Conference program of some 30 technical papers focusing on the commercial and technical issues facing the industry. Of particular…

Yesterday, Luke Wroblewski – Chief design architect at Yahoo! – wrote a blog post singing the praises of audiosharing site Huffduffer. But it wasn’t Huffduffer’s service that got Luke W animated, so much as their sign-up page . While most sites use a standard form with text-boxes and radio buttons for new sign-ups, Huffduffer presents its questions as a ‘Mad Lib’ style statement… “I would like to use Huffduffer. I want my username to be _____________ and I want my password to be _____________. My email address is _________.

Protocols, protocols, everywhere, and not a drop to drink. OAuth, OpenID, UX, Shibboleth, SAML, XRI, FOAF, Facebook Connect, that is a small sampling of some of the technologies that have been invented to move Internet Identity forward forward for the web. Today, at the Open ID User Experience Summit , a jaw-dropping statistic was given that 89% of users coming to LadyGaga.com chose a third-party logon rather than create a new account. “Signup with Facebook, Twitter, or MySpace” is the default option on LadyGaga.com – and it works. Sponsor Do You Have the Credentials: Want to be on the Guestlist?

Mark Fletcher, the man who built one of the first easy email group services online and sold it to Yahoo! for $400 million, then built former market-leading RSS reader Bloglines and sold it to Ask.com, plans to launch a new service next week called SnapGroups (currently password protected). Fletcher planned on unveiling the company tonight at Dave McClure’s Palo Alto event Lean Startups but had technical problems hours before going on stage that delayed the launch of the site. None the less, he offered some details about what we can expect next week. Sponsor Fletcher promised that SnapGroups will include rainbows and unicorns specifically, but thematically will be focused on real-time group communication. Given the company’s name, we presume SnapGroups will facilitate quick and easy group creation.

On Tuesday, Facebook was awarded a major patent for “Dynamically providing a news feed about a user of a social network”. This is a huge deal for a number of reasons, most significantly that it grants Facebook the opportunity to pursue other social networks which are infringing on their patent. Included in the patent are additional claims including feed filters, feed advertising, searching the feed, and more. ( update We’ve been told that this is about the implicit feed stories. Will update when we have more info.) Earlier this morning we reported on another patent which actually has not yet been approved but was simply published.

As of today, Facebook Fan Page status updates will begin appearing in Google search results, according to a tweet by Google. The announcement means that we will begin seeing results from the nearly 3 million fan pages, but not from the more than 400 million users. Google currently controls around 90% of the search engine market, according to StatCounter , with Yahoo and Bing it’s closest competitors. Will Bing’s exclusive access to Facebook user updates change this at all? Sponsor Google first announced the expansion of its real-time Web search last December, noting that it would include data from Facebook, MySpace, FriendFeed, Jaiku, Indenti.ca and Twitter.